NOTES OF THE MONTH.

THE Right progresses. Rent and signatures are fast coming in. This is as it should be: he were indeed a dastard, who should hang back now. Onward! there is no halting-time.-The Missionaries of the Convention are doing good service. It was well to defer the presentation (or rejection) of the People's Petition till the whole labouring population can be aroused to behold the determined insolence of their tyrants, and prepared to meet the after necessity. The sale of Arms increases. Every freeman should be armed: not for the purpose of aggression; but to repel any attack, even one under cover of the law. What! with Canada before our eyes, and the Manchester massacre yet fresh in our memories, shall we hesitate to prepare against that day when the tyrant faction shall send dragoons against peaceable men, meeting on their native soil to discuss their dearest interests? Were every labouring man well armed, think you that even our insane and atrocious Government would dare to assault the People? By the present law, any and every man may carry weapons, if not concealed. We call upon our fellowserfs to arm, for peace' sake. The insanity of our rulers shall not, then, deluge our father-land with blood.-At the Crown and Anchor, on the 16th, the Friends of the People spoke out. We must provide for ulterior measures. We must be organized into permanent societies, and that immediately, to consolidate our strength and that all may be well prepared. Let the Delegates be firm, the People will support them. Though one and all of our Representatives be arrested, we will instantly elect others to fill their placeothers again, if requisite. Men for the "forlorn hope" will not be wanting. WE WILL CARRY OUR POINT. If more violent measures be used against the Representatives of the People, it will be well to call to mind that the "Commons' House," even according to our villainous Constitution, is responsible to the People. It may be well to inquire how this responsibility may be best brought to bear upon them; whether it may not be advisable to require compensation at the hands of those individuals who vote for evil measures. It would be hard to punish those who vote against injustice; at least till they had time given them to come out of the den of thieves and join the array of honest and injured men.-The Lower House of Incurables laugh the People to scorn. They legislate, not for men, but for the possessors of property. How much longer must this be?-"The more speedy administration of justice" was recommended by the Queen, in her Ministers' speech from the throne. Is this why the trial of the Rev. Mr. Stephens is most vexatiously postponed? This is Home-Secretary's justice. It is in character with the dismissal of Mr. Frost from the magistracy for being an honest man: magistrates being appointed, not to dispense justice, but to aid the iniquities of the higher powers. How liked you your rebuke, my Lord John?-We are to have a Rural Police-that another instrument of offence may be in the hands of tyranny, and that the memory of Calthorpe Street may be kept up throughout the country. Englishmen! will you submit to this?-We congratulate the country on the cheering fact that Government have found it difficult to recruit their regiments. We trust that poverty will not drive any of our fellow-citizens to murder (though with a thief's approval) their brothers of the United States. The right of declaring war belongs to the People, not to factious individuals. Why should we uselessly quarrel merely to please our oppressors, who think by such means to get rid of the "surplus population," the troublesome poor.-Things are coming to a crisis. We have no time for Lent amusements, even though the Bishops should officiate thereat. These are not days for play, but for earnest thought, for earnest resolve, who knows how soon for earnest action.-ONWARD! THIS IS NO HALTING-TIME.

"He that his right demands can ne'er rebel."

March 30, 1839.

HONOUR.

Honour consists not in a bare opinion
By doing any act that feeds content,

Brave in appearance, 'cause we think it brave;
Such honour comes by accident, not nature:
Proceeding from the vices of our passion,

Which makes our reason drunk: but real honour
Is the reward of virtue, and acquired
By justice or by valour, which for basis
Hath justice to uphold it. He then fails
In honour, who, for lucre or revenge,

Commits thefts, murders, treasons, and adulteries,
With such like, by intrenching on just laws,
Whose sovereignty is best preserved by justice.
Thus, as you see how honour must be grounded
On knowledge, not opinion, (for opinion
Relies on probability and accident,
But knowledge on necessity and truth,)
I leave thee to the fit consideration

Of what becomes the grace of real honour,

Wishing success to all thy virtuous meanings.

Forde.

THE PLAGUE OF WAR.

FAMINE, the plague, and war, are the three most famous ingredients in this lower world. Under famine may be classed all the noxious foods which want obliges us to have recourse to; thus shortening our life, whilst we hope to support it.

In the plague are included all contagious distempers and these are not few in number. These two gifts we hold from Providence: But war, in which all those gifts are concentrated, we owe to the fancy of three or four hundred persons scattered over the surface of this globe, under the names of princes and ministers; and on this account it may be that, in several dedications, they are called the living images of the Deity.

The most hardened flatterer will allow, that war is ever attended with plague and famine, especially if he has seen the military hospitals of Germany, or passed through some villages where some notable feat of arms has been performed.

It is, unquestionably, a very notable art to ravage countries, destroy dwellings, and, one year with another, out of a hundred thousand men to cut off forty thousand. This invention was originally cultivated by nations assembled for their common good: for instance, the diet of the Greeks sent word to the diet of Phrygia and its neighbours, that they were putting to sea in a thousand fishing-boats, in order to do their best to cut them off root and branch.

The Roman people, in a general assembly, resolved, that it was their interest to go and fight the Veientes, or the Volscians, before harvest; and some years after, all the Romans being angry with all the Carthaginians, they fought a long time by sea and land. It is otherwise in our time.

A genealogist sets forth to a prince, that he is descended in a direct line from a count, whose kindred, three or four hundred years ago, had made a family compact with a house, the very memory of which is extinguished. That house had some distant claim to a province, the last proprietor of which

died of an apoplexy. The prince and his council instantly resolve, that this province belongs to him by divine right. The province, which is some hundred leagues from him, protests that it does not so much as know him; that it is not disposed to be governed by him; that before prescribing laws to them, their consent, at least, was necessary. These allegations do not so much as reach the prince's ears; it is insisted on, that his right is incontestable. He instantly picks up a multitude of men who have nothing to do, and nothing to lose; clothes them with coarse blue, white, green, or scarlet cloth, a few pence to the ell; puts on them hats bound with coarse white worsted; makes them turn to the right and left; and so marches away with them to glory.

Other princes, on this arming, take part in it to the best of their ability, and soon cover a small extent of country with more hireling murderers than Gengis-Kan, Tamerlane, and Bajazet had at their heels.

People, at no small distance, on hearing that fighting is going forward, and that if they would make one, there are five or six pence a-day for them, immediately divide into two bands, like reapers, and go and sell their services to the first bidder.

These multitudes furiously butcher one another, not only without having any concern in the quarrel, but without so much as knowing what it is about. Sometimes five or six powers are engaged, three against three, two against four, sometimes even one against five, all equally detesting one another; and friends and foes by turns; agreeing only in one thing, to do all the mischief possible.

An odd circumstance in this infernal enterprise is, that every chief of these ruffians has his colours consecrated, and solemnly prays to God before he goes to destroy his neighbour. If the slain in a battle do not exceed two or three thousand, the fortunate commander does not think it worth thanking God for; but if, besides killing ten or twelve thousand men, he has been so favoured by heaven as utterly to destroy some remarkable place, then a verbose hymn is sung in four parts, composed in a language unknown to all the combatants, and besides stuffed with barbarisms. The same song does for marriages and births as for massacres.

All countries pay a certain number of orators to celebrate these sanguinary actions; some in a long black coat, and over it a short-docked cloak; others in a gown, with a kind of shirt over it; some, again, over their shirts have two pieces of motley-coloured stuff hanging down. They are all very longwinded in their harangues; and to illustrate a battle fought in Wetteravia, bring up what passed thousands of years ago in Palestine. At other times, these gentry disclaim against vice; they prove by syllogisms and antitheses, that ladies, for slightly heightening the hue of their cheeks with a little carmine, will assuredly be the eternal objects of eternal vengeance; that he whose table, on a day of abstinence, is loaded with fish to the amount of two hundred crowns, is infallibly saved; and that a poor man, for eating two penny-worth of mutton, goes to the devil for ever and ever.

Among five or six thousand such declamations there may be, at the most, three or four, written by a Gaul named Massillon, which a gentleman may bear to read: but in not one of all these discourses has the orator the spirit to animadvert on war, that scourge and crime which includes all others. These grovelling speakers are continually prating against love, mankind's only solace, and the only way of repairing it: not a word do they say of the detestable endeavours of the mighty for its destruction.

Bourdalone! a very bad sermon hast thou made against impurity; but not one, either bad or good, on those various kinds of murders, on those robberies, those violences, that universal frenzy by which the world is laid waste! Put together all the vices of all ages and places, and they will not come up to the mischiefs and enormities of only one campaign.

* Referring to the Roman Catholic Service.