able, and intelligent, he wanted military experience; and assumed the authority merely to prevent anarchy. Chlopicki discharged the functions of the major-general of the army; and the Prince, with the approval of all classes, soon resigned the supreme command to the present Generalissimo, Skrzynecki, who has so nobly vindicated his claim to the arduous task imposed upon him.

(To be continued.)

THE CALL TO POLAND.

HAVE ye sharpen'd your swords? for the battle is nigh-
The morn of the conflict is breaking:

O dark is the dawn, but slaughter's red eye

Shall enlighten the path you are taking,
Bright hope in your bosoms awaking,

That the vengeance which slept under Muscovite sway,
The treasure of years shall be kindled to day.

"Tis Freedom that calls you! though dim be the sun,
The darkness around you dispelling;

Though death-fires enshroud you, and waste is begun,
She to deeds of high worth compelling,

Points to every loved altar and dwelling,

And demands from the sons of the noble in fame

If the hell-mark of slave must still blacken their name!

By the glory your tyrants would quench, but in vain—
By the shades of your heroes departed-

By him who, undaunted, again and again
For the goal of victory started,
Kosciusko the lion-hearted—

By all that is worthy in man's little day,
Go dare as your fathers, or perish as they.

Have ye sharpen'd your swords for the banquet of death?
Have ye made the blood-deep adjuration?

Have

ye dared on the hazard the stake of your breath? Again ye shall be a free nation

Not vain shall be your invocation :

The call of each sword upon Liberty's aid

Shall be written in gore on the steel of its blade!

Ω.

THE POLITICAL TIMES.

THE rapidity of the advance of freedom among modern nations, not less than the energy which impels its progress, naturally excites astonishment. In no series of years so limited, does history exhibit any thing like the changes which the existing generation may almost be said to have witnessed. The spirit which humbled the tyrannical Stuarts, maintained its fervor in transatlantic forests unquenchable amid toil and suffering, and broke out into a blaze at the American Revolution. France, disregarding the moral consequences of her interference in her blind hope of humbling a rival, caught the flame, and kindling the nations around her far and wide, indomitable, irrepressible, conquering, and to conquer, spread it from empire to empire.

Such is the brief history of the march of empires towards the form of popular or constitutional governments. The world is struggling to break asunder the fetters of ages, and to vindicate the rights of its children. It is a great and a cheering sight to the friends of liberty to behold the mighty efforts thus made for bursting the shackles that enchain the mind. But there is one evil inseparable from such a condition of things, namely, -the disorder and confusion consequent upon the rapidity of the change. The breaking at once from a state of constraint to that of almost uncontrolled liberty, has afforded the enemies of freedom a charge against freedom itself. Had the recent events in France, and the banishment of the besotted family which ruled there, been the work of the Chambers, and not of physical popular force, we should find in that country a better and more orderly state of internal government at present. Nevertheless, none but the most bigoted Ultra Tory in this land would venture to impugn the resistance of that people to the inevitable degradation prepared for them by the caitiff who governed them; or condemn the attempts to resist the re-establishment of a despotic system which had cost them so much blood and treasure to overturn. The settlement of a people into tranquillity, especially a people of the mercurial character of our neighbours, who have thus broken for a time the reign of law, will be slow; but the advantages will ultimately compensate for all the evils. It is stupid, it is ridiculous to judge such great changes in the destiny of nations by a shortsighted consideration of the momentary ills they may occasion. The moral earthquake may have overturned much that it was desirable should remain; but that which is destroyed will be erected again in a more noble and lasting form at the appointed time. The philosopher foresees this, and hails the good and evil together, content to await the certain result in the increase of the sum of human happiness. He points with truth to changes in France caused by her revolution, and asks whether a conservative system under a Louis, so eagerly attempted to be upheld by successive coalitions, notwithstanding the atrocities of Robespierre, and the ambition of Napoleon, would have obtained for the bulk of the French people the advantages they have and do enjoy. Whether seignorage, and the gabelle, and the game-laws, and a profligate nobility, a legislation emanating from the will of a Charles or a Louis, were such sacred things, that their conservation was the May, 1831.-VOL. I. NO. I.

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duty as well as the interest of the people. It is in the history of all great national changes, effected by violence when there is no other mode of redress, to cause much ill. It is a part of the law of necessity that it should be so. We have lived to see the prophetic denunciations of Burke, and of those who supported the same principles, completely falsified in their results. He must be a fool, or something worse, who dares to assert that in the last forty years the world has not been an immense gainer by the revolutions of empires, even when accompanied too often by deeds at which humanity blushes; and when the friends of liberty have been ready to say with Roland, "O liberty! what crimes have not been committed in thy name!"

If these things are facts, and we dare assert that they are, if the emancipation of nations from the rule and caprice and profligacy of any individual be a blessing, all good men must hail such changes, at the same time desiring that since they are too often accompanied by great evils, when they are the result of physical force, they should proceed from the wisdom of the ruling power itself. It is true, in countries which do not boast of some considerable degree of political liberty, this cannot be expected; but where political liberty exists already, and the end is rather to purify than to change, this course is the one most consistent with national prosperity, and the salutary reign of law. Mutation is the order of nature. Time is the great innovator. To preserve existing things for a long space in the same state is as unnatural an expectation as to preserve human life from disease and mortality. It is better to amend by degrees, than to resist amendment until it is effected by force.

It is with the consciousness of these truths, which are as undeniable as the fact of human existence, that we find ourselves called upon to support a reform in the British representation. The political aspect of the times impresses every thinking mind with the knowlege that all despotisms are tending to constitutional monarchies. The light of the age has shown that good government is a matter of business, not of dreamy prerogative derived from Adam. The empires around us are struggling to become what we became. We set them the example of freedom. While they are copying us, it well becomes us to purify ourselves from the accumulating abuses of the past, and still to be to them a burning and a shining light. Whether we could be so with the most corrupt system of representation that well can exist, is easily decided. Where the right of legislating is sold for hard money, and the welfare of millions depends upon the capability of raising a sufficient sum,-where an Elwes or a Dancer against a Chatham, Pitt, or Fox, are certain of success, and carry their influence with their purse until they commanded half the representation of the country, surely some purgation may be endured with advantage. The defenders of a "virtual" representation, as they call it, are dreadfully driven to their shifts. Canning did not deny the prevalence of corruption-it was to be lamented, but he deemed the present system preferable to the dangers of a change; and thought that the fact of men being returned by interest, or even by money, admitted many useful members into the House who could not

else get there. He said he would resist it, unless he saw that the opinion of the greater part of the people of England was in favor of some definite scheme in its behalf. The Duke of Wellington, to whose great talents we are ready to do justice at all times,-the Duke asserts, that the present system is the most perfect possible, and that there is no need of any reform at all. His Grace must be fearfully blinded by the beauties of the existing order of things to reason thus. We believe, in charity to his genius as a soldier, and his uncompromising devotedness to the service of his country, that he has studied the constitution of England but little. Most other defenders of corruption and Sugden, of Grampound, and East Retford, oppose reform because they make a profit by its opposite, or, in other words, because it is contrary to their interests. This portion of its opponents are numerous, wealthy, and obstinate. Most of the party have neither talents to uphold them, nor wisdom to conceal the monstrous impudence and inconsistency of their opposition. They are the money-changers in the temple of the constitution, who must be turned out from its sacred precincts, which they have too long been defiling. Away with them then, political usurers and sordid monopolists as they are-the Newcastles and Beauforts, who thus usurp the place of the British people. We ask by what service, by what right, constitutional or moral, such persons claim the privilege of governing the country through indirect influence, and, at the same time that they are trafficking with the rights of their fellowsubjects, audaciously claim for the support of their offspring the offices and places which ought to belong only to talent or public service? Talk of mean motive and lucre-loving prostration of mind among petty tradesmen in their daily vocations!-What have we of their meanness not outdone by many who claim gentle blood for themselves, and insult all around them by their arrogance! We might go on reiterating instances of corruption and mean-spiritedness; but our readers know them as well as we.

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But there is danger in the change," say some, who declare they should not otherwise be opposed to the measure. Lord Chatham declared, if the House of Commons did not reform itself from within, it would be reformed from without with a vengeance. there more danger, then, in the House reforming itself,-in his Majesty's ministers resuscitating the constitution, infusing into it a portion of health and vigor, than in leaving it to accumulate its abuses, that a few wealthy or titled families may still continue to rule it in defiance of reason and law? Will the people of England endure such a state of things, and leave to revolution what they are bound by their birth on the soil of their fathers to rectify? We believe they are not such fools. They will not see that which is their natural, constitutional, indefeasible right, trammelled, or withheld from them and their children any longer. We repeat, that if the House of Commons be not reformed from within, it will be reformed from without with a vengeance at no very distant period of time. Let it be recollected we are only borrowing this language; we are only using the words of one of the ministers of George III. who raised this nation to a pitch of glory it never knew before. This is no new-fangled doctrine, but it is old, substantial, pure, downright

English. A spirit is abroad in the earth resisting bad governments in foreign countries: it may prevail here, if it have abuses to lay hold upon, and to an extent that men of the greatest temerity would not wish to witness. Let all such danger then be avoided,-let the remedy proceed under the reign of law from the government itself, thus preventing national disorder, and warding off all danger of remedy by physical force, the duration of the evils of which, experience shows us cannot even be conjectured. The most ludicrous objection made by those who are interested in the preservation of the old system with all its abuses, is the want of right in parliament to disfranchise a rotten borough, or change the qualification of an elector. This comes with peculiar grace, as has been observed in the House of Commons, from those who have disfranchised electors by the thousand,-from many who were parties to the Union with Ireland,-from those who recollect our national history! Such trashy arguments may be natural to my Lord Farnham, my Lord Kenyon, or his Grace of Newcastle, but they must tend to lower the majority of others who use them in public estimation. If we want examples of fallacy in argument, it is humiliating to our national pride that we find them most readily in the senate-nay, under the sanctity of the peerage itself.

It is asserted that the reform proposed is revolutionary. This is a cant phrase in the mouths of the Ultra Tories, whenever they want to alarm the timid, or whenever they fear that their own interests are endangered. There is no man in this country, except he be a follower of Carlile and his gang, who dreams of changing the form of Government. The measure proposed is but a return to the principles of the constitution and of our hereditary monarchy. It is a restoration to the people of rights of which they have been despoiled—a return to them of that portion of power in the management of their own affairs which has been usurped by those who had not the smallest right to do so- -by those whom the letter of the constitution and law condemn as criminal for the acts which the reform now contemplated also condemns. The interference of the peerage in returning members to parliament is a high offence; the corruption of electors is a high offence; the vending boroughs in broad day as articles of vulgar traffic is a gross offence. Yet are these abuses the very things for which the opposers of reform are now in reality stickling under the plea of danger to the constitution, for which they are invoking the vengeance of their household gods, hooting "revolution," shouting that the Church and King are in danger, and that all which is respectable, meaning themselves and their private interests, is to be brought into contempt. If those who assert these things are brought into contempt, they will have rendered themselves worthy of it. We are of opinion, that none can be brought into contempt who do not merit it; and that they who find themselves in this predicament are justly contemptible.

We are not, like the radicals, condemners of the aristocracy of the country. What is so denominated, is an essential part of the body politic, which must consist of gradations to excite honorable ambition and to stir up the different ranks of people to emulation. we condemn the excessive influence of aristocratic power. In this country, aristocracy and democracy are to be kept in due balance,

But