COLONEL THOMPSON'S EXERCISES.

UNDER the title of' Exercises, Political and Others, these six volumes contain the bulk of Colonel THOMPSON'S published lucu- brations, together with a few which now appear for the first time : and whatever differences may exist as to their soundness or literary merit, there can be none as regards the industry of the author and the variety of his studies. In the Exercises before us, will be found numerous papers on politics and political economy, morals, mathematics, music, the art of war, and literature in ge- neral: not taken up on the spur of the moment by a writer neces- sitated to write, but evidently handled because the previous know- ledge of the author had given him views and information which he took the occasion of imparting. As respects variety of subject, few writers of the present day can vie with the Colonel, regard being had to the essential qualities just hinted at—that his variety is not a mere change of mode, as from novels to poems, or from poems to dramas; or of general subject, as from history to fiction ; or from topic to topic within the range of general education and worldly discourse, as in SYDNEY SMITH: but it is essentially based on a course of scientific study even in morals and politics. It is the more permanent nature of his matter, springing from this learned acquaintance with his subjects, which is one main characteristic of Colonel Tnomesom's writings ; and which gives him, where republication is concerned, some advantage over every periodical author, not perhaps excepting SYDNEY Smrrn himself. His manner, too, is equally distinctive ; but in manner he has some equals, and SYDNEY SMITH is unquestionably his superior. In saying this, it is at once admitted that passages could be produced from Colonel THOMPSON of equal effect to any from the witty divine : it may also be allowed, that the topics of the soldier are frequently of a much more abstruse nature than those of the clergyman : pure mathematics— or the mathematics of music— or questions of value—or even scientific arguments upon Free Trade—not admitting of that lucid exposition, to the general reader, which questions in literature, morals, and politics allow. Still, we suspect that each of these subjects might be presented with more clearness than Colonel THOMPSON presents them as wholes (for particular parts are often struck out with an unrivalled clearness.) Whether the cause is to be found in the little leisure which the writer allows himself for revision—or whether he uses mathematical and logical formulas needlessly and pedantically—or whether he has borrowed a notion from his master BENTHAM that a proper description consists in the enumeration of every par- ticular—or whether there is some deficiency in mental perception and comprehensiveness, which prevents his distinctly seeing those things which alone are essential to the establishment of his views— we believe the fact to be, that some of Colonel THOMPSON'S ex- positions are obscurer than is necessary. In scientific topics be has not the pellucid clearness which distinguishes BAILEY of Sheffield, though much excelling him in impressing particular parts ; and in more general questions he wants the finish and clearness that characterize SYDNEY SMITH.

Notwithstanding the number of his works, the extent of his ac- quirements, the learned character of his general matter, and the seeming novelty of his views, we doubt whether Colonel THOMPSON can be considered as a discoverer of truths, even in a limited degree. Some might go further, and doubt whether he can always apprehend actual truth,—meaning by that phrase a thing which is true in the abstract, but not in the actual circumstances of the case. This deficiency renders him not well adapted for combining with others in any practical object, still less for heading a party or the section of a party which has any practical objects in view : though by no means a man with one idea, he very often seems like a man with one notion. And this peculiarity of the Colonel's character appears to have been seen by the mass, with the intuitive sagacity which both ARISTOTLE and CICERO attribute to them, whilst they are incapable of fully comprehending his valuable but more refined qualities. It is this, and this alone, we think, that explains his singular position ; for if Colonel THOMPSON is himself a host, he is a host by himself Nobody thinks of electing him their head ; exceedingly few of inlisting under his banner. Notwithstanding his amiable and unblemished cha- racter, his various knowledge, his undoubted ability and industry, the liberality of his opinions, and the rarer liberality with which he has expended large sums of money upon public objects, Colonel THOMPSON is out of that assembly to which the public speaker and active politician naturally looks—and to which be has not dis- dained to look—as to his goal.

After this, it may be asked what is the Colonel's distinguish- ing characteristic. To which the answer must be, that of an illustrator—that quality by which something (no matter whether disputed, admitted, or not disallowed) is presented to the mind with such felicity of phrase or of image that the idea seems to be presented for the first time ; though it is the mode of pre- sentation which is the novelty, not the idea itself. Of this cha- racter are his leading papers on Catholic Emancipation, the Pro- tective System, the Corn-laws, the Military System of Napoleon ; and of this character too are some of his most striking passages, of which we quote a few examples. If the reader take the trouble to consider, he will find that the state of the Whig Ministry in 1841, the advice to Constituencies at the last election, and the arguments upon Protection and Machinery, have no original novelty of idea : the novelty is in the quaint felicity of the illustrations—and very felicitous they are. PIGEONS' FEATHERS—AN ILLUSTRATION.

The rural population of the Northern Counties have a prejudice against ad- mitting pigeons' feathers into the family collection, and they are invariably burnt or thrown away. The reason given is an odd one,—that nobody can de upon them. One might have thought this should have procured their entrance into the materia medica ; but the conclusion come to is different. There is a state of not dying, which it seems is held worse than death. Surely the Minis- terial benches would be found stuffed with some such deleterious substitute for wool. Their tenants suffer all the pains and agonies of the Yorkshireman that cannot die. The fatal conclusion is before them, and they cannot avert their eyes. Yet one shift after another postpones it, as their unhappy conch pre- sents the materials of wo.—(5th March 1841.)

SOMETHING BETTER THAN PLEDGING.

There is a much better way for constituencies to obtain their end, than either " pledging " or "not pledging ": and that is, to take men whose past lives and conversations are some kind of pledges for them. Do not take a wolf because he pledges himself to vote against mutton; nor even a doubtful, of whom what is known is, that he was bred and born among wolves, and con- tinued with them till something prompted him to see better quarters and pro- vender on the other side. This last, however, is a very favourite animal in England ; he suits a number, whose fear is of getting something that would do too much. He helps to keep things as they are, and put down any dangerous violence of innovation. Besides, it encourages good breeding among wolves; no man can say but they may end by turning shepherds' doge.

AN ILLUSTRATION OF PROTECTION.

Port wine can he had for 40s. a dozen from Oporto, through the intervention it may be of a trade in Sheffield cutlery to Portugal. Up stands a man and says he will be bound to make good wine that shall pass for port, in hothouses at home, for the small charge of 80s, a dozen ; and he shall conceive himself an ill-used gentleman if the Legislature will not encourage domestic industry, and the Members for Sheffield vote for the same. And the instrument he will pro- pose shall be a duty to be laid on Oporto port, to raise the price to 80s., or it may be to 85s. Suppose, then, be is in full enjoyment of his scheme. Wine-drinkers are drinking the home-made port at 80s.; and all this, it is boastingly affirmed, is laid out on British industry. But was not 80s. laid out on British industry before ; to wit, 40s. on the industry of Sheffield, and 40s. more on that other place, wherever it was, where the consumer chose to indulge himself with something for his money ? If so, what is the national gain, but a clear loss of 408. to the consumers of vinous comforts ?

MACHINERY.

I cannot help thinking you take a too unfavourable view of the dangers arising from machinery ; and that this proceeds from not giving sufficient im- portance to what may be called the compensatory part of the process, as esta- blished by nature or the actual constitution of things. Take, for instance, the case of yourself, who receive a pair of stockings woven by machinery for two shillings, where three would have been given to a knitter. Here, you say, is manifestly three shillings worth of ruin and starvation to knitters. Granted there is three shillings loss to the individual who would have knit and did not. But see what are the compensations. In the first place, two shillings go mani- festly to a weaver of stockings, instead of a knitter ; which is only a transfer, and as far as two shillings go, makes a balance in the aggregate. Next, with respect to the one shilling which is the difference of price: do you who are the wearer of stockings, or do you not, expend that shilling on somebody or other to his satisfaction and benefit, where you could not have expended it if you had been obliged perforce to give it to the knitter ; and does not this gain to the tradesman so employed, in the aggregate, balance the loss of the third shilling to the knitter? and does not this, added to the other, make a complete balance to trade, in the aggregate, with respect to the whole three shillings? And be- sides all this, have not you, the wearer of stockings, the comfort, satisfaction, and gain, of having had something for your third shilling instead of nothing? For example, if you laid it out in an additional pound of beef-steaks, have not you and your family, who helped to eat them, gained the beef-steaks? * * It appears to me, therefore, that the vast increase of the products of industry, which has made the difference between civilized men and savages, has been mainly effected through a process in which there was a continual succession of losses to certain individuals, overbalanced at each separate act by greater gains to certain other individuals; the individuals originally losing being themselves in the end involved, if not to a perfect extent, yet to a very great and consider- able extent, in the ultimate gains. The knitter finds his trade a losing one, and he or his posterity is obliged to take to something else. But he and his posterity cannot help finding in the end that they have a share with others in that increased facility of obtaining useful thinga. When Mr. Brook maintains that the use of machinery may be carried too far, I should be disposed to change the phrase into carried too fast.

Among the various accounts of the distress in the manufacturing towns, the following appears to us at once the most striking and truthful that has appeared, notwithstanding the quaintness of the leading idea of

THE SIEGE OF BOLTON.

I have been at the siege of Bolton; for nothing but some such cause sug- gests itself as adequate to the phmnomena. And is it not a siege ? not carried on, perhaps, by an enemy within gun-shot, but by one working on a wider radius, and making his blockade by sea upon the means of life.

Many sights it has been my chance to see ; and I think I know what is the minimum of help with which horse, ass, dog, hog, or monkey can sustain ex- istence, and where it must go out for want of the appliances and means of living. But any thing like the squalid misery, the slow, mouldy, putrefying death by which the weak and the feeble of the working classes are perishing here, it never befel my eyes to behold, nor my imagination to conceive. Did you ever set eyes on a pennyworth of mutton ? Come here, and you shall see how rations are served out under the landlords' state of siege. It might bait a rat-trap ; though a well-fed rat would hardly risk his personalitiea for such a pittance. Pennyworths of mutton, and halfpennyworths of bread cut off the loaf, are what the shopkeepers in Bolton deal out to the inhabitants of their Jerusalem. I saw a woman come for one halfpennyworth of bread, which was to be the dinner for herself and children twain; and when I re- flected that of this transparent slice the other half was gone to bay the land- lords' claret, astonishment possessed me at the endurance of that bearing ass, the public, and the extent to which ignorance and divisions will prop the rich man's robbery. I saw another mother of a family, who said she had not tasted meat for many months; and on one of the children being sent off to the butcher's for some of that strange luxury, she was discovered making efforts to intercept the messenger. Her anxiety was to instruct the boy to bring back nothing but one pennyworth of bacon : there was a to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, for which she had conceived the idea of spinning out existence by means of the remainder of the fund.

if you are curious in human misery, if you are anxious to know what a shabby tyranny can bring the rank and file to suffer, come at your leisure to the "leaguer " of Bolton, and see what the people sleep on, if they do sleep. Chopped dirt, the sweepings of a ben-house, mingled with a proportion of sparrows'-nests, to show that men had heard of straw, would be the best re- presentatives of what they huddle upon in corners, and call it resting. In saying that Colonel TnompsoN is not a discoverer of truths, we mean of truth embracing a philosophical principle. His large experience of life, and his constant observation of it, have not only given him original images for many of his illustrations, but have also enabled a man of his shrewdness to perceive many of what may be called sensible truths, or truths discovered by " sensible " per- sons. Such is the following view of the naked theory of MALTues- which the Colonel might perhaps apply to some theories of his own.

" But I will go further, and admit, at the hazard of all consequences to my- seK that I was perfectly convinced of the soundness of the arguments by which, on the naked question of a public establishment for the support of the poor, it had been shown that the plan was impolitic, and on this ground above others, that it created the pauperism it professed to relieve. And I have no dread of avowing where the arguments came from : they came from Malthus, an author who was always right in his naked theories, but sometimes greatly deficient in not extending his consideration to the circumstances by which they were to be surrounded. Take, for example, his theory of ' Population '; a theory which will stand like the Pyramids, if applied to trace the consequences to a population of rats shut up in a cage to multiply upon a peck of corn a day for the whole, be they many or few. But why did he omit to ask why Mere should be a cage, and how it could be got rid of? "With these notions, how came I by a right to muster myself among the opponents of the New Poor-law ? Simply for this reason—that the dispute was not upon the naked question; it was upon the question complicated with circumstances which it was intended to conceal."

CONSTITUTION OF MODERN CAVALRY.

Look at the cavalry force of almost any European country, and there will be seen immense expense and luxury both in men and horses, huge attention to every thing that is splendid in the eyes of children, but very little to the real purposes of war. In every obstinate campaign, there is a struggle between the opposing cavalries, which shall keep itself in condition for action longest. Is this an object aimed at or sought for in modern cavalries? What are the sub- stantial operations of cavalry, but those of a great hunting-match ; and who but a madman would go a bunting in the guise and cumber of a modern dra- goon? Long and quick marches are of the essence of cavalry operations; and there is hardly a brigade of cavalry in Europe that would move thirty miles in four hours, and least of all by night, without being virtually incompetent to further operations, and this through having never practised or meditated the principles required for causing extensive bodies to move rapidly in column without floating and concussion of the component parts. European cavalry is taught to move in line upon picked ground and in rolled barrack-yards; but set a line of five or six thousand horse to move at the gallop for two miles to- gether over an ordinarily open country, (which Saxe truly said was the test of a line cavalry's being good for any thing,) and everybody will be found abroad as to the theory and practice by which such an operation is to be accomplished. They have been accustomed to move for a hundred yards in a gimcrack line, and halt all together by a signal, which is precisely the thing not wanted in war ; but the rapid doublings and nndoublings by which the parts which meet with obstacles must preserve their average position, the moderated medium pace at which alone it is possible for the movement to be conducted, the pre- servation of the general line on principles totally independent of the absolute uniformity of motion of all its parts,—all these are things very little under- stood or reduced to practice. On a field-day, in all probability—and in a real movement against an enemy where the fear of misconstruction would operate against the execution of the estina lentd, with all certainty—the attempt at speedily such an operation would degenerate into a race, where each MIR would go as fast as legs could be aid to ground when the thing was practicable, and go slower only when it was not ; and the whole would arrive at the end in a state of complete dispersion, presenting a perfect bonne bouche for an organized enemy who should be lucky enough to be waiting there for the chance of what might follow. At this moment it is not written down in the regulations of any power in Europe, at what aggregate rate such a movement, in an average cavalry country, should be conducted—what should be the rate at which the parts delayed shall proceed to recover their relative positions—what measures are to be provided to maintain the aggregate uniformity of advance, if the divisions which in ordinary circumstances direct, are temporarily retarded by obstacles peculiar to themselves. They have regulated the moustaches and the sabretaches ; but how all these other effects are to be produced, and as Jeremy Bentham would have said if he had been metamorphosed into a cavalry general, "maximised," they have left to chance and each man's unpractised discretion when the time conies.

SUPERIORITY OF WOMEN.

This argument on the convenience of cutting off half the claimants to votes at a blow, is really the only one of reasonable appearance the opponents have. 'Per on every other ground the admission of women to vote would be a great ad- dition of security for the general welfare. Among other reasons why it would do good, are these two special ones—women in general are not such fools as men are ; and secondly, they are not such knaves. Your man is ordinarily an ass, ready to follow any claptrap which rogues may put before him ; and this from some shabby expectation of being the successful thief, or the victorious op- pressor. If all the detestable and disgraceful public acts which have darkened the last quarter of a century could have been submitted to ajury of women, three out of four would have been stopped by the superior sense and virtue of the referees. Women, in fact, are vastly further advanced in civilization than men are; vastly more removed from the instincts and passions of savage life ; more accustomed to calculate consequences, because it is on them they have always fallen in their bitterness, and above all things less deteriorated by that wear and tear with the meanness and villainy of the world, which is the inlet to half the miseries of mankind, by enfeebling the belief in the possibility of re-

sistance. .

It is impossible in our limits to enter into any thing like a no- tice of the contents of these volumes; hut it may be as well to give some general account of them. The first three volumes con- sist of articles from the Westminster Review. The fourth contains a variety of pamphlets ; the capital Letters of a Representative to his Constituents, forming a running commentary on the sessions of 1836 and 183'; and some miscellaneous papers, including a treaty with the Arabs which Colonel THOMPSON negotiated in 1820. The fifth and sixth volumes contain Letters addressed to different journals on passing events, or in advocacy of the doctrines of Free Trade, during the years 1840, '41, and '42; and though inferior In interest to the Letters descriptive of the doings of the Repre- sentatives, contain some of the best passages Colonel THOMPSON ever wrote. When we add that these six volumes contain on an average some 500 pages each—that they are well printed, neatly got up, and sold t'or only fifteen shillings—it will be comprehended that profit is not the object of the publication.