POLITICAL VIVISECTION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.1
SIR,—Having read your article entitled "Political Vivi- section" in last week's Spectator, and as an old-fashioned Tory who regards the Earl of Halsbury as one of the few remaining " pillars of the State," I would like to express my gratitude to you for that most excellent and timely article. The paragraph on p. 931 commencing "Let us say again that we are not pessimists " is particularly encouraging to me, and though, unhappily, I am seldom in complete sympathy with many of the opinions expressed in your most valuable and influential paper, I certainly was last week, and have been delighted with your extracts from Burke, whom I regard as having been rightly called "an oracle of God" (though not "an old-fashioned Tory "). Yon, Sir, like Lord Beaconsfield, as be stated in his famous speech on the third reading of the Corn Importation Bill of 1840, " have faith in the primitive and enduring elements of the English character," and may you continue to publish the finest dicta
of the old Whig Party to refresh our weary minds in these unsettled days. I would like to remind you of one other famous, but, I believe, not often quoted, extract from Burke —viz., from " Thoughts on the Present Discontents "—which perhaps you may think appropriate to the present time :—
" Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field, though, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour."
Your large extracts from Burke in the last and recent numbers of your paper must be my excuse for troubling you
with another.—I am, Sir, &c., TORY.
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