with all possible decorum, discuss ed with all possible solemnity, and the bill was passed into a law with all possible contempt of the petitions and the petitioners. This year, numerous petitions are presented to both Houses of Parliament, imploring the legislature to grant relief to the Jews from the civil and political disabilities under which they labour; not one petition, I believe-not one solitary petition-has been brought forward in opposition, and the measure actually before the House for giving effect to the prayer of these petitions is rejected! It is said, the only sure way of making a pig go the way you wish, is to pull him by the tail in an opposite direction. It would certainly seem, that to petition Parliament for a thing, is the infallible mode of not getting it, as it is no less an infallible mode of getting it, vehemently to protest against having it. Upon the whole, indeed, the last and present session may be considered as singularly propitious with regard to ascertaining the exact value of that invaluable right, as Mr O'Connell might say. The Duke of Wellington (it was before he was a minister) once called the petitions of the people "a mere farce." He would not, perhaps, call them so now, content with the power of proving them no better. It cannot be long, I should think, before the people themselves will be of his Grace's opinion; before they will disdain, with "bated breath," and in a "bondman's key," to approach the honourable House with acres of parchment and oceans of ink, for the sake of asserting a privilege, the whole and exclusive benefit of which consists in its assertion; like certain forms, that are still kept up when the purposes for which they were originally instituted are gone to decay, making of an ancient ceremony a modern mummery. Should this time come, it will be followed, in the first instance, by a state of sullen apathy or quiescence-the sure precursor of a national feeling, that the period had arrived when the people must look after their rulers. With respect to the Jews, it is a question upon the lips of every rational man-" Why should we play the squeamish hypocrite, and after having gulped down the camel, make such wry faces at swallowing the gnat?" We have built a bridge broad enough to allow of the passage of seven or eight millions of Catholics and Unitarians into the citadel of the constitution, and we refuse to make it a few inches wider to accommodate thirty thousand Jews! It is like the prudery of a prostitute, who limits the number of her bedfellows, fixing the boundary of virtue between ten and a round dozen; or rather, like that same prostitute, admitting every denomination of Christians to her embraces, but, in the spirit of my Lord Darlington's political chastity,' denying her favours to "Turks, Jews, and Infidels."* It is rank af The genial influence of a "Tory administration acting upon Whig principles," has had an extraordinary effect upon his Lordship. He has spoken again! Not only, therefore, has he spoken twice in seventeen years upon questions of importance, but twice in one session. He speaks so much to the purpose, that I hope, now he has begun, he will go on. Although a friend to liberty in general, and to Parliamentary reform, I shall oppose this motion, as I consider it uncalled for." And mark at what personal hazard he opposes it. "I shall do so notwithstanding a warning I received from a friend the other day, whom I met in the street, and who asked me, if I voted against this measure, how I could ever hope to borrow money among the Jews? But I replied, that the Jew would be just as ready to lend me money as before, since it was for his own sake, and not for that of the borrower, that he afforded the accommodation; and I quoted the passage in the Merchant of Venice, in which, when Shylock says, Fair sir, you spat on me on Wednesday last; You called me dog,' and so on, Antonio replies 'I am as like to call thee so again, To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too. If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not As to thy friends, (for when did friendship take fectation. Mr Huskisson said very truly this evening, that the "arguments he had heard against the emancipation of the Jews were precisely the same, mutatis mutandis, which he had been in the habit of hearing urged, for the last thirty years, against the emancipation of the Catholics;" and Sir Robert Peel, as if it were his ambition to give peculiar point and emphasis to this declaration, rose immediately after the right honourable member for Liverpool, and spoke a speech-aye, just the sort of speech he was wont to utter in his better days, when he was the champion of Protestantism. I declare, before God, I should be sorely put to it, to make my election, were I asked which I would prefer to endure the consciousness of enormous apostasy, or the intolerable martyrdom of having to deliver the sentiments Sir Robert this night delivered, to the same House of Commons, and in the very presence of the same men, who, not twelve months since, had heard and seen me declare my apostasy. The right honourable Secretary is either dead to all feeling, or every word he uttered was wormwood on his tongue, and anguish in his heart. How innocently, how ingenuously, forsooth, he "regrets" the principle now assumed, that because, in the session of Parliament before last, we were called upon to give our support to a measure for the relief of the Protestant Dissenters, and last session we passed a bill for the relief of his Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects," therefore," we are are bound in consistency to follow up these measures by adopting the present!" "I hear this with regret, and I hear it for the first time." Very likely, Sir Robert; but not for the last time; of that you may rest assured. "In the discussions respecting either the Catholics or the Protestant Dissenters, nothing of the sort was ever intimated." No-they were then trying to get in the small end of the wedge. "It was never stated to us, that because we admitted our fellow Christians to a participation of power, that therefore, as an unavoidable and necessary consequence, we were bound to admit to all the privileges of the Constitution, men who reject Christianity altogether." Did it require to be stated? Was not the "unavoidable and necessary consequence," at which you are now so terrified, plainly written upon the face of your own apostate measure? Or if it were not, was it for those who were seeking to subvert the Constitution by your aid, to apprise you of all the mischief that would ensue? A well-armed traveller, who delivers his pistols to a highwayman, might as reasonably complain that he was afterwards robbed by him, as you to affect to deprecate the "unavoidable and necessary consequence" of delivering up the Constitution to Catholics and Dissenters. Your distinction between Christian Papists, Unitarian Christians, and Unchristian Jews, is a poor and puling one; every way unworthy a inan who aspires to the character of a statesman; and if you be sincere in your surprise at what has followed, you only prove yourself to have been grossly ignorant of consequences which the lowest clerk in your own office could have laid before you. You cannot claim our confidence in your sincerity therefore, without awakening our contempt for your imbecility. What a fascinating air of novelty there is in the following discovery and argument! "In the speeches of Burke, and in his recorded sentiments as contained in his writings, we learn that he rested his strongest reasons upon the Christianity of the Roman Catholics; so of Mr Grattan, of Mr Canning, and of all the great and eminent advocates of that cause. Even my right honourable friend on my left, (Sir George Murray,) in press A breed of barren metal of his friend?) Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face "In conclusion, I will never consent that Turk, Jew, or Infidel should be made a member of this House." It is not every man who could give such excellent reasons for his conduct. See Debate, May 17. ing their claims upon the attention of the House last session, observed, that when serving with the Protestants in the army, they entered together the same breach, they fought together on the same field, reposed together in the same grave, and rested their hopes of future happiness upon the merits of a common Redeemer: those appeals were forcibly made, and successfully made; for it was not to be denied that Protestants and Catholics admitted the same great doctrines of Christianity." Theology and sentiment-twaddle and cant! These would be pretty sentences, Sir Robert, from the lips of your brother-in-law, Mr George Dawson, after dinner at a tavern, or from the pen of a very young lady, in the shape of an "Elegy upon the brave men who fell at the Battle of Waterloo," but as an argument in the Senate, to vindicate the wisdom of a great national measure, they are contemptible. For to what do they amount? That a Catholic, having taken the King's bounty and enlisted, when on the field of battle fights as well as his brother Protestant, knowing that if he does not, he may be tried, perchance, by a court-martial for cowardice, or, that if he runs away, he will be shot as a deserter: that when a Catholic is killed in battle, he is buried in the same hole, with fifty or a hundred other Catholics or Protestants, as it may happen; and that if a Catholic has time to think about it before a cannon ball carries his head off, he thinks of the same Mediator as a Protestant. But it is in this last particular only that your parallel is perfect; for as to entering the same breach, fighting on the same field, and reposing in the same grave, I apprehend deists and atheists, of which I dare be sworn there is a tolerable sprinkling in every army, fare just as well; therefore, so far as these merits constitute a claim to the relief which the Roman Catholic has received, they who are not Christians are entitled, upon your own shewing, to similar privileges. I am ashamed to have bestowed so many words on so flimsy and puerile a piece of declamation. "But if this bill pass," you go on to say, "though it may apparently be limited to the Jews, and though confining our view solely to this bill it does not go beyond that class; yet we shall, if this be agreed to, have to pass other bills most objectionable in my views of the Constitution.” Your views of the Constitution, Sir Robert, what are they? and what are they worth? What is the Constitution itself since your views veered round from north to south? Again, "What is the case made out respecting the Jews? It would seem-I take my information from a book, which I understand is written by a very respectable Jew, and is considered a work of authority-that there are resident in the United Kingdom about 27,000 Jews, natural born subjects of his Majesty, of whom 20,000 are resident in London, and 7000 in the other parts of the kingdom; and for these seven-and-twenty or thirty thousand individuals, I am invited to depart from the principle which has been acted on from the earliest period of the Constitution." I can easily imagine how shocking, how distressing, it must be to your feelings, to be invited to depart from any principle of the Constitution. You have shewn such a reverence for the Constitution-such an attachment to the Constitution-such a love for the Constitution. Your passionate devotion to the Constitution is so notorious, that I, for one, would not be the man bold enough to "invite" you to offer any violence or disloyalty to the Constitution. I only wonder how his Grace of Wellington escaped killing last year, when, instead of "inviting,' he ordered you, to "break in upon the Constitution." But enough of this. It is sickening to hear these phrases from your lips; though, to do you justice, you have adroitly shifted your constitutional ground, and now talk only of the " earliest periods of the Constitution"-" the earliest foundations of the monarchy"—" the beginning of civil government among us," and so forth. Even you have not the effrontery to play the queasy minister, and keck at being "invited to depart from the principles" of the Constitution as established by the glorious revolution of 1688.-One word more on this part of your speech. "For these seven-and-twenty or thirty thousand individuals, I am invited to depart from the principle," &c. The claim advanced on beg half of the Jews, is either founded upon justice, or it is not. If it be just, thirty, or thirty thousand, or thirty millions, can neither weaken nor strengthen it. But this argument supplies the solution of your apostasy. Had there been only thirty thousand Catholics, you would not have discovered the justice of admitting them to power; but being six millions, their right became as palpable as their magnitude,-in other words, intimidation looked big, and principle dwindled into a dwarf. "What I contend is, that if the principle be adopted, (the principle of admitting into Parliament persons not professing Christianity,) it will place infidels on the same footing as Protestants; and if this principle be recognised, the House must be prepared for its revolting the feelings of the country." Granted. It would revolt the feelings of the country to see atheists and infidels, avowedly such, sitting in a Christian legislature, and making laws for a Christian people. But is it on this ground alone that you, Sir Robert, are so repugnant to " depart from the established usages of the constitution?" Have you no higher and better feeling on the subject? Are you only anxious to spare the feelings of the people, and to save them from being revolted? I will tell you why I ask these questions. Because I like consistency, even in bad men. A steady determined villain is of the two a more manly character, than the shifting, equivocating, ducking, half-andhalf knave, who has all the moral laxity of a rogue in his composition, without the bold energy which constitutes a hero, even in a bad cause. Do not imagine I am capable of applying this comparison to you. I would do so, if I thought it applicable in itself; but I will not weaken my own cause, by casting unmerited contumely upon our opponent. All I mean to convey is this, that the sensitive regard you now manifest for the feelings of the people, was dormant or extinguished last year, when you carried a measure by which, not the feeling only of the country, but the confidence, the allegiance almost, (as some hereafter may prove perhaps,) were revolted. I come to your last, and, from the solemnity of your manner in delivers ing it, I should judge your strongest, unjust to make a distinction between the Jews and the Quakers; but it is not by excluding the Jews, but by admitting the Quakers, that justice is to be done; and I marvel that the honourable member for Hertfordshire should be for taking up the question at the wrong end. If the honourable gentleman vote against the Jews now, on the same principle he ought to have voted twice over against the Dissenters and the Roman Catholics." You were in the House, Sir Robert, when these few pithy sentences were uttered, and yet you adopted, as your own, the specious argument they annihilated. Altogether this must have been a night of sore humiliation to you. It is im possible but that you felt your situation; and surely there were moments when, if you could have forgotten what you are, you might have fancied you were defending the Protestant Constitution of England as in days of yore; but one thought of those days was sufficient to make your tongue cleave to your mouth, and parch it like a dried potsherd. I pitied you, however, while Brougham was rending into shreds and ribbons your notable argument derived from the importance of adhering to the "ancient practice of the constitution," which admitted none but professing Christians into the legislature. His task was easy, I confess; for his strength lay in your weakness. MESSRS NORTH, DOHERTY, AND O'CONNELL. Brabo. Ha! ha! to see the world! We swaggerers That live by oaths and big-mouth'd menaces, Are now reputed for the tallest men. When next I find him here, I'll hang him up, Like a dried sausage, in the chimney's top, That stock-fish, that poor john, that gut of men! A Pleasant Conceited Comedy, 1602. Barker. Tell me, and do not stammer; When wert thou cudgell'd last? What woman beat thee? It was well remarked by Canning, in one of his speeches against parliamentary reform, and in reference to some of the vulgar demagogues of the day, (Cobbett, Hunt, &c.) who looked to universal suffrage as the only passport they could ever hope to obtain into the House of Commons, that if they did find their way there, or if any other mob-orator, or brawling politician, the oracle of clubs and hustings, found his way there, one and all, they would soon reach their true level, and shrink to their proper dimensions. The justice of this opinion has been frequently verified. Burdett himself is a greater man at the Crown and Anchor, than on the Opposition benches; Hobhouse tells far more in Covent Garden, during an election, than he does in St Stephen's Chapel; and as to Waithman, poor body, he is the very Chatham of the Common Council, and the veriest unheeded chatterer of the House of Commons. I doubt, however, if the contrast, in any of these, is so striking, so signal, and so complete, as it is in the person of the great agitator," the redoubted Daniel O'Connell, liberator of Ireland, and Catholic member for the county of Clare. And the reason of the difference is ob vious, partaking partly of national, partly of personal considerations. It would be ridiculous to compare O'Connell with either Grattan or Flood, both of whom sunk, in the English House of Commons, far below the standard at which they stood in the Irish one. The fact is, Irish oratory requires Irish auditors, Irish feelings, and Irish subjects, to produce its full effect. It is completely a home commodity, and fetches a good price in the home market; but being manufactured specially and exclusively for that market, the moment it is exported, it deteriorates in value. With regard to O'Connell, however, while I admit that some portion of the comparative insignificance into which he has fallen, |