BEFORE these pages issue from the press, the great contest which now agitates the empire will be terminated, and the effects of the Reform Bill for good or for evil incontestably demonstrated. It is a moment fraught with anxiety to all the friends of their country; of exultation and joy to the numerous party of the Revolutionists; of dismay and apprehension to all those attached to the institutions under which their fathers have lived, and England has prospered. To us who have long contemplated these events through the calm medium of historical reflection, it is neither the one nor the other. We perceive in the events which are passing around us the exact and literal accomplishment of all that we have long predicted as the result of the Reform Bill; and anticipate with more certainty, from the accuracy of our estimate of its effects in the commencement of the movement, its ultimate and certain extinction.

That the great bulk of the middling ranks in all the great towns are inclined to support the Movement party; that they have brought in the Reform candidates out of gratitude for political power conferred, and in anticipation of revolutionary benefits expected, may be considered as now proved to demonstration. With a few exceptions, the importance of which shall be immediately pointed out, all the great towns have brought in persons who are, or profess to be, of the Movement party. The returns from the counties have not yet been obtained; but we are far from sanguine as to their result. Those from Ireland will exhibit a vast preponderance of furious repealing Catholics; those from Scotland, which is nearly as bad, an equal majority of well organized and subservient innovators; men who make a game of revolution, and coolly calculate, it is to be feared, how long the process of demolishing our institutions may maintain them at the head of affairs. The tried loyalty and hereditary right feeling of the English agricultural counties will go far to stem the torrent in a large

part of the heart of the empire; but wherever manufactures prevail, their usual demoralizing influence will be perceived; and every where the fatal L.10 clause has let in a flood of enemies to the constitution, whom it will require all the efforts of the friends of order, and no small change of public opinion in the smaller proprietors, to keep within any thing like due bounds. There is no concealing the fact, that a great majority, probably two-thirds of the new House of Commons, will represent what may now be called, with perfect justice, the Revolutionary party; that is, the large body who consider the Reform Bill as only a means to an end; and value it just because it opens the floodgates to that torrent of innovation which promises soon to overwhelm all the institutions of the empire, and subject us, if not so rapidly, yet not the less surely, to all the levelling principles of revolutionary France,

The friends of the constitution, and among these we number nearly the whole old Whig as well as all the Tory party-all those who attached themselves to particular parties in the state, in the perfect understanding that they were to do nothing to break up its fundamental principles, -are in the utmost alarm at this portentous state of public affairs; and numbers, we know, of the most ardent supporters of the Reform Bil among the higher and educated classes, inwardly execrate the fatal alliance which they formed with the Revolutionists, and the wide door which they have opened to a flood of innovations, which they now find themselves totally unable to prevent. Such men may well mourn over the fortunes of their country, by them irrecoverably blighted; its constitution by them sacrilegiously destroyed; its liberties by them ultimately overthrown. We have no such regrets; we now experience the inward satisfaction of having throughout discharged our duty; resisted equally the seductions of Ministerial influence and the menaces of popular vengeance, and stood by our country to the last, when hundreds

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of thousands, who had shared more largely in its blessings, abandoned it to its fate.

There is, however, no room for unmanly despondency. Our readers know whether we have not uniformly taken the gloomiest view of the effects of the Reform Bill, and represented its passing into a law as the commencement of incalculable evils to this country, and to none more so than to its most vehement supporters. Although, however, the result has proved that these anticipations were too well founded, yet the same views lead to the revival of hope, nay of well grounded confidence, in the future triumph of those Conservative principles, without which no society on earth ever yet prospered, and which the present triumph of the Revolutionists is of all other events the one best calculated to accelerate.

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stitution has been brought to a worse extremity than that to which its enemies have now reduced it. Think on the Parliamentum insanum, the wars of the Roses, or the despotism of Cromwell. Such, and so fleeting is the cloud which now passes over the fair face of England; and as bitter and universal as was the repentance of the nation, when the head of Charles dropped from the scaffold, so general will be the return at some future time to those better feelings, which ages of wisdom had produced, and years of infatuation have overwhelmed.

There is, in the first place, a wellfounded confidence to be placed in the superintendence of Providence, and the justice of the cause which we support. We are not striving to uphold any decayed or corrupted monarchy, like that of France in 1789, or any tyrannical and oppressive government, like that of Charles I. or James II. We are supporting, on the contrary, the most glorious monument of civilisation which the world has ever seen; institutions which have united, to a degree unprecedented in any former age or country, the vigour of popular enterprise with the steadiness of aristocratic determination-a constitution which has blended, beyond any other which ever existed, the utmost extent of popular freedom with the highest degree of public order; under which the empire has grown grey in years of renown, and all the classes it contains attained an unprecedented degree of public prosperity. Those who believe in the existence of a Supreme Power, and the moral government which it exercises over the affairs of the world, can never believe that such institutions are to be permanently destroyed, till those who share in their blessings are unworthy of them, and they have ceased to promote the great ends of the social union. Till this is the case, there is always hope. Reflect how often the English Con

There is, in the next place, a most important ground for hope, in the vigorous, manly, and in many places successful stand, which the Friends of Liberty have made against the combined efforts of Ministerial influence and rabble excitation. There never, in truth, was an Opposition placed in such trying circumstances, or so portentous an union effected to overwhelm every manly and independent feeling. The patriot, in general, is supported either by the Government or the populace. He is either applauded by those whose weight and station entitle them to most respect, or by the vast multitude of his fellow-countrymen, who share in his feelings and animate his exertions. At this time, from an unprecedented combination, these opposing forces draw the same way. The attraction of the sun and the moon operates in the same direction, and can it be wondered at that a flood-tide is the consequence? None of the ordinary motives which influence an Opposition, are now allowed to operate in swelling their ranks; neither the applause of the people, nor the favour of the Government. Nothing remains but the naked feeling of Patriotism, uncheered by the applause of the multitude-unrewarded by the smiles of the great. But if this unexampled combination has diminished their numbers, it has purified their ranks and ennobled their cause. It is now separated from all the passions which seduce and taint mankind; from the giddy love of popularity, the selfish crouching to power, the disgraceful shrinking from danger. The Conservatives who have now stood forth to defend their country from the as

saults of the Revolutionists, are men who have rejected every temptation, and braved every danger at the call of duty; and such conduct, even in this scene of wickedness, will not go without its reward. The time will come when their conduct in having done so will extort the admiration of a grateful world; and even at this moment of party triumph and assumed exultation, it is envied by all among their opponents who are worthy of the name of men, and hated by their unworthy followers from the bottom of their hearts.

It is this superior energy and vigour of the Conservative party in England, which constitutes the great difference between the progress of the English and the French Revolution. The principles of anarchy have been just as strongly at work in Great Britain, as they were in France forty years ago; they have been urged on in the same manner by the Government, and aided by the same support from the Executive; but nevertheless the progress of dissolution has been incomparably slower in this country than it was in the neighbouring kingdom. The cause of this difference is to be found solely in the superior energy and vigour of the Conservative party. Instead of flying from the approach of danger, and leaguing with the enemies of their country to menace its independence, the friends of order in England have resolutely stood by its fortunes; they have met its enemies wherever they appeared, in the Senate, in the Press, at the elections on the hustings; and though generally overborne by numbers, or drowned by force, they have never failed to assert the eternal superiority of their cause, by irrefragable arguments and manly eloquence. Such conduct makes us proud of our country; it forbids us ever to despair of its fortunes, and by pointing out one vital point of difference between our convulsions and the French Revolution, justifies the hope that the terrible calamities in which the latter terminated, may be spared to its inhabitants.

The Revolutionists in this country, from the Administration downwards, have been even more reckless in their measures, and inconsiderate in their changes, than the leaders of the French Revolution.

They have none of the excuses which palliated the misgovernment of the Parisian reformers, because they had none of the grievances which there existed to complain of; and the bloody beacon existed in unshrouded deformity to warn them from its approach. They have urged on a movement as fearful, impetuous, and ungovernable as that which brought Louis XVI. to the scaffold. What then has so long delayed the evil, still moderates its dangers, and gives the most desponding still ground to hope for their country? Nothing but the vigour and resolution of the Conservative party; the universal adherence to their country in times of danger; the patriotism, talent, and courage of the nobility, and all the higher classes in the state. It is that, and that only, which has hitherto acted as a drag on the wheels of the Revolution; which has as yet saved from convulsions and bloodshed the infatuated multitude who urge it on; and which, undeterred by danger, unmoved by obloquy, still pursues its glorious course, blessing and to be blessed.

In the third place, the Conservative party have good cause to hope, from the evident and universal impression which they have made on all the educated classes in the state. The elections for Oxford, Cambridge, and Trinity College, Dublin, demonstrate what every person acquainted with the society of persons of education in every part of Great Britain has long known to be the case, that the present Ministry are with that class the most unpopular that ever held the helm of affairs.

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The Whig candidates could not shew themselves in Oxford Cambridge; and at Trinity College, they were defeated by a majority of three to one. Strong in the Tower Hamlets, Marylebone, and St Giles's,

irresistible among the weavers of Manchester, and the blacksmiths of Birmingham, they could not venture a struggle with the educated gentlemen of England even at the Whig University of Cambridge. This is a decisive omen as to the future fate of the empire. Brute strength, physical numbers, cannot, in the end, contend with intellectual superior ity; the diamond edge of genius will sever bonds which the strength of

millions could not break. The arms and legs, in a moment of intemperance, may cease to obey the head; but the eternal subjection of matter to mind will not the less, in the end, be asserted. It was not thus at the outset of the French Revolution; all the educated classes there urged on the movement, and their heads began to fall before they were convinced of their error; but the superior intelligence and habits of thought of England, have saved it from this ruinous infatuation. The coming storm has been seen by the education of the country; and they have set themselves manfully to resist it. They were too late in doing so to prevent the onset of the storm, but they may still influence its direction and moderate its fury. The sway of the Revolutionary party is rapidly subsiding in the educated classes; it is altogether extinct in their higher grades, and dying out in the lower. It is still paramount in the middling and lower orders, because they are always swayed by the principle which ten years before influenced the higher. In the present inundation of Movement members into the House of Commons, may be discerned the natural consequence of the absurd pseudo-liberality which, six or eight years ago, distinguished so many of the young men of rank and fortune at the universities. In the opinions entertained by their successors at this time is to be found the harbinger of a brighter day to future times, and the mirror of public opinion, after a long interval of disaster and suffering, in future years. These anticipations must be still farther strengthened if it is recollected, in the fourth place, that the middling orders, in whom the strength of the Revolutionary party now lies, must soon be exposed to individual suffering and misery in consequence of the infatuated course which they have pursued, and the wicked lead ers whom they have chosen to follow. All the great interests of the country, and with them all the small interests of the country, are at stake. The Church is the first victim; and it has spread its roots too far through the middling classes, not to excite a general and heartfelt feeling of regret and indignation when it is despoiled of its ancient inheritance. The Corn Laws, and the Funds, when they are

assailed, will each affect the livelihood and subsistence of millions. It will no longer be the political power of the higher orders which will be tied to the stake to be worried by the dogs of revolution, but the fortune and subsistence of large masses of the people; and the triumph of the Revolutionists will be dimmed by the tears of the orphan, the cries of the destitute, the wailings of the dying. When those disastrous events occur, as occur they will, it is impossible that a large portion of the middling and lower orders should not break off from the leaders who have ruined and betrayed them. We lament the misery which will then be created, we shall do our utmost to alleviate it, so far as we can, but we know that it is unavoidable. Misery and suffering must tame the fierceness of passion in nations as well as individuals; the laws of nature are not to be broken with impunity; and those, who, disregarding the voice of wisdom, will yield to the tempter, must in sackcloth and ashes repent of their sins, not less in the political than the moral world.

Are these the speculations, merely of philosophy, unsupported by experience? Look at Bristol, and say, what lesson does it teach to the British people, as to the wisdom to be learnt from experience, the fatal effects of indulging their passions. Where was the passion for Reform, and the desire for revolution, so strong as in that devoted city; where is it now so completely extinguished, and the old English feeling so thoroughly revived? Bristol has passed through the fiery ordeal; the natural result of revolutionary passions, has been there felt; the city has been burnt and ruined; its industry and commerce are rapidly decaying, and its wretched inhabitants, taught by suffering, have abjured their errors, and seek, by a return to their ancient principles, to procure a return of their ancient prosperity. What Bristol has suffered and learned, the empire at large must suffer and learn; and when the terrible lesson has been taught, the result will be the same, and the gloomy night of revolution will be followed by the glorious morning of the restoration

Lastly, the talent and courage which