Opiniont of tbe
PRESENT POSTURE OF AFFAIRS.
WESTMINSTER REVI ew—Moralista and preachers take advantage of the new year to review the past, and enforce resolutions for the future. Merchants take stock of their waree, balance their accounts, and adjust the state of their affairs.
Honest people pay their debts if they can. Enmities are abandoned ; friend- ship. are formed; hospitalities exchanged, and all prepared to begin. an writ, or to arrange future operations. What people do in individual and metal matters, is not uubefitting in political. The past year has been most fivourable for this purpose, closing a period rich in incident, with a position of public affairs never exceeded in interest and importance. The People have before them the two aides of their account with their Rulers. They know the problem to be solved. Shall the powers of evil, or the powers of good have the ascendancy ? Where shall rest the decision ? Shall it be in the few, or in the many,—for one, Or some, or all ? The Whigs, like Napoleon and so many others, refused to do right when they might; and they are broken to pieces. Half principles will not suffice one whit more than half honesty. Human nature may be weak ; knowledge may be limited ; experience may be wanting ; still the sincere, honest, hearty effort, and nothing else, can do good. The proceedings of the whole year have made manifest the feebleness of Whiggion and compromise; and it has ended in what every body said it would, the return of the party whose object and principle is everywhere to sacrifice the good of the community to that elf the few. There is this good, at least, that the Goliath is before us. There Ma greater good still. The source of the overthrow of the Whigs is now put beyond question. The Court has put itself in opposition to the country, by adopting the Tories, who are the people's enemies. A seer of political events alight have foretold this issue; and it requires no seer to discover what is to come after. By a coup d'etat with quite a different object, the King has saved the country from the greatest danger that could have happened. The people despairing of the successful issue of the principle of Re- form through want of leadership, might have sunk one part into apathy or fear, and the other into impatience or violence. By this timely stroke, all people have been thrown into their proper rank ; and there is fair hope of time good fight being fought. It is not worth while to go into a eedious inquiry of how all this came about. The Whip were weak, because they had not learned the strengthfulness of honesty. The Court and the King hid long wished to get rid of them. The Tories were known to be ready. And the King seized the first opportunity that offered, for reinstating his friends the Tones. It is now plain, that the King is adverse to Reform,—moved by what influence it matters not. The King, it seems, has exercised his prerogative; whether wisely or well, history is preparing a page to show. The Monarchy, to all appearance, might have lasted for ever, If it could only have got out of its head that the abuses of other institutions were necessary to its existence. Thus, it is said that the House of Lords is necessary to the existence of the Monarchy. Now the House of Lords has set itself directly against the hopes and wishes of the great majority of the people, and therefore is considered by them as an evil. At all events, therefore, from the good of the Monarchy, the people in their balance. sheetwill deduct the evil they con- sider as derived from the House of Lords. In the same manner the tyranny of She Church of England sectaries, is declared necessary to the Monarchy. Another deduction therefore must he made fur the evils of the Church; and the astute in other instances. The danger of all this is, that instead of the Monarchy's being a good which compensates for all them evils, it should at some time be represented to the people as the great unreasonableness, set up and maintained that all lesser unreasonablenewes may flourish untouched under its shadow. These is no use in rashly endangering the strongest cause. There is manifestly a point, beyond which the tuo.t ardent ad lll i l er of monarchy cannot with safer's, hazard the object of his worship. Least of all was it politic to veld the irritatink wircumstarice of putting the Monarch on the naked and rude exercise of hie personal judgment and interference; a complication of the case most perilous to the advisers, because it is obvious to the meanest capacity, that they can never expect to carry through the matter with advantage to the Crown, except by achieving au entire conquest over the people, amid returning to the worst and most fearful times of English and of Irish history. Let the least trip or failure occur in the course they have thus marked out for themselves, and the 31onarcliv they profess to love, stands by their act and interference, shorn of all the beams that can be cut off from it by failure in an unpopular design.
TORY THREATS AND ALARMS.
Canal cc—The Tories find their manoeuvres fail, and they are anxious to disclaim them. A few days ago, the nation was threatened by the Tory scribes with repeated dissolutions of Parliament, till a House of Commons might be collected which would support the Tory misrule. We treated the threat as an idle boast, intended only to frighten electors into .voting for the Tories. It has answered a very di tfei ent purpose—it has made the electors vote against the Tories ; and therefore the Tory press now disclaims it upon authority. No aecond dimolution, it is said has yet been a subject of Ministerial deliberation but let no man-suppose that it will nothe ifthe Tories do not succeed. To get into office, they, and their Orange pateens in Iteland, hate not hesitated to plunge the country into its present reflex of political imitation, the end of whirl, no man can flower ; and who eon possibly b: lieve that they will hesitate, for their own selfish purpome, to apeat or strive to continue it ? In November, the whole land was hushed in tranquility: and no man dreamed of elkturbante. The Destructives wete at it discount ; agitation was decried by every class, ex- cept the thartige awl Repeal agitators. The Nation demanded repose to pros. secute its indosti hats pursuits In peace The Tories put an end to that happy state ; they provoked agitation. they dissolved the Parliament ; and who CAM believe that they would not again pursue the same mad career, if they antici- pated surcess ? They at e already indeed alarmed at the predominance of that extreme party which has been called into life and vigour to resist their own ex- treme principles. Mr. Wakley, and Mr. Hatvey, and Mr Holm. r, are only returned by Metropolitan moist ituencies because the constituencies are. provoked by the itioatel pretensions of the Tories. If, as the Tory writers say, we are to. look for a great crisis from such returns, the Nation will have to till that to the numberless political crimes already committed by the Tories. We long agts deprecated it as the result of their own fully, while we foretold that it would be. inevitable.
Gieme—The Tory party still continue fulminating cataloguer; of all the evila that are to restilt from their overthrow. This has been so much the device in all tinws of discarded s: rving-men—the intetests of their masters hove so much been at the tip of their tongue, and the impossibility that the cellar, the stable, and the butler's pantry should otherwise than go to rack and ruin when deprived of their managetneut has ever superseded SO completely all regret for thi.ir own pet tinisites in the minds of Tories below stairs—that, with trifling variations, their vhole vocabulary just now might serve the uses of' Conservative rhetori- cians in higher places. It ie nothing short of revolution—nothing short of im- mediate anarchy—with which we are threatened from they to day by troy organ' of Toryism. Nothing short of a coup d'etat under barely constitutional forms, can, according to their ablest advisers, save us from this dire comaimmation jut the event of the present Elections being such as it is clear that they will be. To remonstrate with a desperate faction as to the danger of this language, would, we are well aware, he time thrown away. The proximate peril of losing Dower, which they see more and more iniminent, has totally shut out from their view the ultimate results of their actions. No persons, however, whose minds are not perturbed by their situation, can possibly be influenced by the wild deauncia- thins of men who see at stake their last venture for renewed supremacy. . . . It would be a merited retort upon the frantic outcries to our opponents, to tell them that the ir persevering charges of Revolutionary principles arid violent designs, ou all who dare to answer the challenge thrown out by the diesolutiom in the manner which they must, if Reformers, indicate on their part principles and designs which they do not dare plainly to acknowledge. We are acting on his Majesty's invitation to declare our opinions as between Refinaning and Anti- Reforming principles, precimly as we acted on a similar invitation front the Throne in 1831—only with more calm, with more moderation, with more conetitutional retinue than in the struggle for constitutional rights it was possi- lair, perhaps, *to preserve. Exactly in proportion as the language and the con- duct of the Liberal party are unprecedenteilly rational and measured, that of the sai.disant Conservatives becomes increasingly rabid and virulent. We accept with equal pleasure the indications thus afforded on both sides, on the one hand of full confidence of a victory which will not be abused; on the other, of the hitter foretaste of final and decisive defeat. As a ruling party, the doom of the Tories will be fixed by the present Elections. For we cannot credit their wild threats of a second dissolution. That would realize, with a vengeance, their own predictions of public confusion. But we do not fear an attempt like this even from Wellington-Stormont hardihood. 11 y a loin de to plume au poignard ! The Tories will think better of IL STANDARD-- . . . We presume to put ourselves forward RS representa- tives of that vast body of the humbler class to whom defect of rank and defect of talent forbids ambition, but who are nevertheless, by moral education, above being corrupted. We, and hundreds of others of this class, have been for four years warning our fellow subjects against submitting themselves to the guidance of the meanest and worst men in the community, through the des- potism of their passions ; against chaining themselves to tile wheels of a gang - of ambitious blacklegs, swindlers, perjurers, fellows whose offences we cannot ap- propriate to their names without offending against decency, and exposing ourselves to the rnalties of law. Yee it is characteristic of the present rent race of Revolution- ists, that to write the characteristicany one of them, however temperately, is to write a libel. Patriotism—always to some extent the resource oh a scoundrel—seems, as far as we can bee around um, to have been orgauized into the monopoly of a close corporation : that which formerly was only one of many qualifications for the craft, seems now to be the only title of admission. And yet there are men who profess and call themselves Christians, who can look upon the state of af- fairs with indifference; who tell us we have no right to look into the private lieu of public men ; who. forgetful of the masculine injunction of the Apostle, not to "bid even Good speed to bun" who in practice or in word, denies the faith, " lest we be partakers of his evil deeds," would place the profli- gate or Infidel in the place of power—in the place of power over the ac- tions of men, and, as far as religion can be affected by human power, in power over the religion of the country This is almost now the only topic upon which we can address Electors. We, and our betters, have exhausted all others again and again; and the language of events, far more eloquent arid peremptory than human language, has for four years reiterated the warning, that the political course which we have been pursuing as a nation, must conduct with accelerated rapidity, to prompt and hopeless ruin. If the people, like nattily horses, will plunge more violently forward en account of the checks given by the King, who would save them, the guilt he theirs; they du not perish unadvised or unrestrained. But let men gramly reflect whether they ought So be willing to incur the responsibility of worshipping pi ivate vice with thew homage, in addition to the responsibility of plunging their country in ruin. [When speaking of private vices, the Standard of course means the vices of hew Katmai., not of such dignified per- sons as the Wellesleys, Laws, &c.
TORY OVKRTURES : A COALITION MINISTRY.
Times—Suppose for an instant that the comet was clear, and that the Whigs had office again placed within their reach by his Majesty, in what shape would or could an Administration be constructed? If Lord Grey were induced to be Once more the head of it, could he have the assistance of Lord Stanley and his friends, or not ? If he could it tuust be on the condition that nothing more ex- tensive in the way of Irish Church Reform should be granted by Lott! Grey than that which Lord Stanley before agreed to. But then, what becomes of those other Whig Ministers whose declared difference with his Lordship on that occasion drove him and his four colleagues to resign ? The Irish Church ques- tion is not one that can be shirked. It is not one that can be treated as a neutral question, like Catholic Emancipation, the disgrace of so many Ministers. Then let us look at the matter like men of business, and ask the elect Ors and those who are working on them, what it is they want? If Lord Stanley were in office, the majority of the old Whig Cabinet, and indeed Lord Grey himself, must quit- him,
or alter their 'minds, and deserve that bruited name of" renegadoes.' they held their former sentiments, Lord Stanley holding his, there must be a split on one side or the other. Again, Lord Grey, supposing Lord Stanley off, would
not act "without Lord Althorp in the House of Commons," Where the noble Earl declared hint to be the sine qua non, and in which House, while the British Monarchy remains, Lord Althorp never more can *it. Does it appear that Lord (bey would be more inclined than a higher personage let it be undirstood he was, to accept for leaders in the House of Commons any of those ge.ntlenien whom Lord Melbourne mentioned successively to the Sovereign as substitutes for the present Lord Spencer ? We hardly think it. But furttrar, Lord Grey could not again endure Lord Brtugham in the Ca- binet ; if he could, his Majesty would not. Why, then, we are reduced to the thin a.nd imserviceable staple of the Melbourne Ministry, minas the Ex-Chan- mItor, whose office would be that of a tracked trumpet to the Ultra .Radicals, swelling the noise and aggravating "the pressure from without,"--a pressure which it would be physically impossible for Lord Milbourue to withstand for eight 'sod-forty hours ; and the Radicals reckon on such the weakness of the noble laird's position, and would loudly hail his return to the Government, that they might themselves climb in upon his shoulders. There is, to be sure, *nether alliance, and one more honourable, and to the country far more useful, *which would be, and perhaps now is, within the noble Viscounts power ; that is, in union with some of the most respectable of his recent colleagues. Why -not inquire into the feasibility of an alliance with Sir Robert Peel, and on the pi ieciples of constitutional Reform ? There might possibly, on the Irish Church question, be less difference between Lord Melbourne mal Sir Robert Peel than between Lord Melbourne and Lord Stanley. We hazard the opinion, that if ever the Ultra-Radical pressure is to be effectually resisted, it will, it must, be by such a union as that which we have now suggested, between the rational and moderate portions of the Conservatives and the Whigs.
MORNING Cneonicte—The Times would seem to have fairly given up the Peel Ministry ; for it recommends an alliance between Lord Melbourne "in union with some of the meat respectable of his recent colleagues" and Sir Ro- bert Peel, and endeavours to show that the Ultra-Radical pressure can only be effectually resisted "by such an union between the rational and moderate par- firms of the Conservatives and the Whigs." What next ? If this journal guides the political opinions of three fourths of the People of England, all we can say that they are under precious guidance. It was but the other day that the Tit* took credit for having pushed Lord Grey, and overcome his reluctance to move; and it is notorious that it loaded him with abuse, and positively insulted him, on account of his reluctance to propose measures unpalatable to the Peers, and congtatulated the country on the prospect of obtaining, from his success, bolder and more vigorous measures. And yet this most impudent of journals has the assurance to state, " that there were persons in the very Cabinet of the noble Earl who so sympathized with the Radicals out of doors, or were such servile tools at their disposal, as to force a series of measures on the Government, which rapidly and effectually broke it up." This reminds us of the part which the Devil is made to play in the old legends. After an unfortunate sin- ner has yielded to his temptations, he immediately upbraids him with his folly. The Times upbraids Lord Grey with the. embarrassment it caused to him. Must assuredly the Times avails itself liberally of its irresponsibility. In the article in the Edinburgh Review, attributed to Lord Brougham, he alluded to this faculty of some journalists, of forgetting at a convenient time the advice they themselves give, when the result proves disastrous ; but Lord Brougham's description falls very far short indeed of the unblushing profli- gacy of the Times. Fortunately, our contemporary has been more successful of late in destroying itself than in destroying its adversaries.- TRVI Sun.—The glorious result of the City Election has naturally struck terror into the hearts of the Tories. The Times seems to consider the game so completely lost, that it coolly proposes a coalition between Sir R. Peel and Lord Melbourne. The noble Viscount, after having- been called upon by his Sove- reign, to convey, like Sir John Cope, according to the Scottish ballad, " the news of his sin defeat," is to be offered some humble place in the councils of the aforesaid srocions Monarch, in alliance with the very men through whose in- trigues he and his party were expelled. Really our e mtemporary's next of kin should look after him, to avert, if possible, his reversionary interest in a ver- dict of fo(o de se.
APT ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TORIES AND THEIR IRISH CHURCH.
Exams:En—A Government that keeps abuses, in much in the same con- (Eden) as a man who keeps mistresses ; and we have to do with a Captain Mae/math in that sort of profligacy. There is the Irish Church, for example, with the disturbance of a nation, and an army to be maintained for it. As was well observed by Colonel Evans at a recent meeting, when about :3000 people of one creed have to pay l500/. a year to supply the spiritual wants of 28 persons of another faith, the collection must be made at the expense of some considerable number of horse and foot. It is probable that in the Rathcormac slaughter the powder and ball levelled at naked breasts cost more than the sum recovered from the widow. There is hut one way of making the Irish Church pay its military 'expenses; and that is, by selling to anatomists the bodies of those slain in the ctillection of its blood .stained revenue. By this expedient, which would at once serve divines and surgeons. and destroy the trade of Bucket's, Bishops, and Resurrectionists in England, the Ratheormac butchery mould yield about IMO guineas, at the rate of ten guineas a subject ; which would probably he about the amount of a fortnight's expenses to the .country of the military employed under Archdeacon Ryder. We think that this suggestion of ours will be admitted to be more feasible and efficient than -Swift's project for the consumption of children. A glut in the dissection-rooms is the only check to tie expected. It shows great patriotism on our part thus db point out to the Tellies a method of making one of the eldest sod most loved -abuses pay its expenses—literally pay its way in blood. Little did those who attributed the in /miles of gunpowder to the devil imagine that potent corn- 'bustible would be thesele power of a Christian church. " How beautiful are the feet of those who ,preach the gospd of peace,"—when they are wet with warm gore, and leave the print of Cain and Mammon ! "He ellen preach Peace, Archdeacon Ryder renders, He shall give the word to fire with ball-cartridge; and so well have the 'bullets performed their mission of peace, that twelve 'spirits are calmed past the disturbance of tithes, and where the weary are at rest. The true and active Miseionary Society of the Irish Church is the arsenal ; its tracts are cartridge-paper; and he who rune inlay read the errand of its bullets. It penetrates the hearts of men in a most -tvaanswerable manner, and converts the living to the dead. Rat, we repeat, these things are expensive ; and the question ts, whether the electors of England are content to pay the price of such luxuries. Let them ouffer the Tories to gain a majority, and all such abominations have a renewed lease. Some change of the mode will alone be attempted; for, as sincere Reformers deal with institutions having virtue in them, so the Tories deal with abuses having -nothing but vice in them: they propose to renovate, not to destroy—to change the outward shape of the thing, but to leave the substance and the core of the mischief unchanged. In a word, they would only trim and prose abuses, that their days may he long and their fruit copious. As we have befcre observed, we know the men to be unchanged in spirit and opinions. Their pLICC of penitence, had they been capable of penitence, was in Opposition; and mark what they are, in marking what they were in this Oppoiiition. The wolf has just now a bone in his throat : pull it out- land your bill to the removal of the stoppage in the wolf's gullet, and make a *1wthoroughfare tor the swallowing up- of your own substamx.
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