NEWS OF THE WEEK.
IT is understood that the Earl of CAMPERDOWN will move the Address to his Majesty in the House of Lords, and Lord CAVEN- DISH in the Commons. They are two men of whose disinterested support Earl GREY may be proud, both on the ground of their own excellent characters, and of the fair fame of which they are the inheritors. It is not to be supposed that Ministers will introduce into the Address any expressions which can serve either Tory lord or Tory squire with an occasion of cavil, and therefore it is most unlikely that any attempt at amendment in either House will be made.
Of the nature of the alterations which it is intended to make in the Bill, with a view to favour the decent retreat of those Peers who have hastily and inconsiderately taken 'up a false position in opposing it, various conjectures are abroad. We believe that no other than such as have been made with this charitable view, or which are calculated to give greater verbal simplicity to its details, will be found in the new measure. We believe at the same time, that Ministers, on this as on the occasion of its first intro- duction, have shown that they can keep their own secret ; and that their political friends and their political enemies are utterly igno- rant of the changes on which the former, but especially the latter, have taken upon them to pronounce so decidedly.
The Home history of the week has been distinguished by one incident only—the trial of the three men whose conduct has been for some weeks the subject of a deeply-interesting investigation, charged with a murder more foully imagined and perpetrated than any that has disgraced the criminal records of modern England. Their condemnation, after a long and patient examination into their guilt and its attempted defence, satisfactorily proves the ne- cessity of a speedy revision of those laws to whose absurd rigour in a great measure the crime and its consequences are referable.
From Abroad, we have had rumours of disturbance, deep and extended. The riots of Lyons have been likened to those of Bris- tol, with a view, if possible, to derive from the excesses of the lower an excuse for the continued toleration of the abuses of the higher classes—thus meeting disease with disease, instead of remedy. This attempt of the opponents of Reform has been as unsuccessful as those that had preceded it. The people of England are not so dull that they cannot distinguish between the outrageous conduct of a lawless mob, or the desperate endeavours of starving work- men in a manufacturing town, and the steady, soberly matured, and legally expressed wishes of the enlightened and unanimous popu- lation of a great empire. And if the people of England were persuaded that there was any remote connexion between the burnings of Queen's Square or the slaughters of the Croix Rousse and the cause of Reform, the persuasion would only further stimulate their longings for that change which all wise men know to be inevitable, and all honest men look on as desirable, and which the utmost exertions of the dishonest and the foolish cannot long delay. For they would not fail to discover, in the ignorance which produced the one series of riots, and the dissatisfaction which occasioned the other, one reason the more for an alteration of that vicious system under which ignorance is sought to be perpetuated by rule, and of which dissatisfaction is the natu- ral and never-failing issue.
