must not be excluded from the management, but they must not be allowed to obtain a majority. The instant they do so, the balance is subverted; the great weight of public opinion runs down to the wrong side, and the machine is destroyed by the acting together of the forces which were intended to keep it in due equilibrium, by exerting their respective influence in opposition to each other. It was with a view to the establishment of a system which, abolishing at once and for ever all selfelection and close management, should establish Corporate and Municipal Reform on such a safe and constitutional basis, that Sir Robert Peel, we are persuaded, continued the commission which the Whigs had issued. Something required to be done. Abuses in many places existed; corporations had dwindled away to a few members, and funds had been diverted from their destined ends to the purposes of individual aggrandisement, all this, the result of the want of due public control over those intrusted with the management, required a remedy; but let us beware, lest, in avoiding Scylla, we fall into the jaws of Charybdis. The Corporate Reform which the Conservative would have introduced would have been one based on the true principles, founded on the remedy of acknowledged abuses, without the concession of more democratic control than was necessary to guard against their revival. This would neither have been innovation nor revolution, but renovation and improvement; which, without departing from the fundamental principles of European society which have subsisted in these realms for a thousand years, would merely have cut off the abuses which time had fastened on its institutions, and restored those checks which experience has proved to be essential to their permanent well-being. What the Corporate Reform of the O'Connell Administration will be we know not, though we own our anticipations are of the very worst kind. In the close of their official pamphlet on the Reform Ministry and the Reform Parliament, published in October 1833, the Whigs avowed that their intention was to reform all corporations and municipal institutions as they have done those of Scotland, by subjecting them at once to the direction of office-bearers elected by the tenpounders. If such was their design in October 1833, we much fear more moderate councils are not likely to prevail in May 1835, after an alliance offensive and defensive has been formed with the Radicals, and O'Connell has been installed in his important office, that of the secret and irresponsible ruler of Government. If any such rude and Radical innovation as this is brought forward, we call upon Sir R. Peel and the Conservatives to oppose it to the uttermost in the Lower House, and upon the Peers at once, to reject it in the Upper. The subject of Corporate Reform is not like the Irish Tithe Bill, pressing, and productive of calamity if delayed: it is one which may, with perfect safety, be rejected, and which had infinitely better be rejected an hundred times over, than permitted to lead to the establishment of such an execrable system as the management of municipal or corporate institutions by the ten-pounders; in other words, by a clique of needy, rapacious, and, for the most part, unprincipled adventurers in every city, who have acquired the dominion of the people by flattering their passions. We denounce such a system, as fraught with the very worst possible effects, as calculated instantly and irrevocably to fasten upon the country abuses and corruptions tenfold greater than it removes-as subversive of the natural and only safe order of Government, and utterly inconsistent with the whole system and fabric of European society. We denounce it still more, as laying the axe to the root of the true nursery of freedom, which is to be found in the association of men in situations of trust and local power in every part of the country-who are held together by the durable bond of common interest and profession, and as likely to destroy those strongholds in which infant liberty in modern Europe found its first refuge and surest support. We tell the people of England that the ten-pounders are nothing but an aggregate of numbers from a particular class in society, without any community of occupation, profession, or durable interest, held together by a rope of sand-that no permanent or lasting efforts in favour even of liberty are to be expected from their exertions-that no freedom ever yet subsisted six months which was established by the agency of such a heterogeneous multitude, and that in the lapse of years they inevitably and invariably sink under the despotic rule of a single or limited number of leaders who have made their passions the means of destroying the bulwarks of real liberty in the land. We say this not from the mere deductions of history or foreign observation-not merely from a contemplation of the utter and irrevocable prostration of freedom which has resulted from the destruction of the corporations and overthrow of the old municipal system in France, but from a practical acquaintance with the working of the proposed change in our own country, and a melancholy recognition in the Scottish towns, under the Burgh Reform system, of all the innumerable abuses and evils which historians and observers of foreign convulsions have unanimously concurred in representing as following its establishment in other states. If, after such warning, both from history and experience, the English are deluded enough to swallow the bait of Radical Corporate Reform, they deserve to suffer all the incalculable evils which follow in its train. But we confidently hope for better things. We trust in the effect of the general burst of indignation which the monstrous alliance between Whigs and Radicals has occasioned. We trust in the at-lastawakened sense of the nation to the enormous danger which awaits alike our civil and religious liberties, from the rapid strides which Catholic ambition, going hand in hand with infidel impatience and democratic despotism, has recently made. We trust that the well-disposed and rational part of the English people will see that Corporate Reform is nothing but the sop thrown out to Cerberus, while the perilous gates are passed; the peaceoffering presented to the populace during the important crisis when an irretrievable inroad is effected upon the Protestant constitutions of the empire. It is just because the O'Connell Ministry clearly perceive that the nation has become alive to this danger that they will infallibly present the municipal and corporate institutions of the empire as the next holocaust to be offered to the spirit of Revolution, and the most effectual means of diverting the public attention from the real objects which they have in view; and it is for that reason, as well as on account of the enormous peril with which the measure itself, if based on Radical principles, is attended, that all friends to their country should combine to resist the momentous change. Let the people of England, therefore, support Corporate Reform, but resist Corporate or Municipal Revolution. Let them cling to that Conservative amelioration which can alone remedy the evils of the close system, without inducing the woful corruption of a ten-pounder Administration; and by furthering the improvement, but resisting the destruction, of our institutions, at length put a bar to that feverish passion for innovation which promises to bury in one common_ruin our liberties, our religion, and our national existence. INDEX TO VOLUME XXXVII. Aird, Thomas, poem by him of the American Starling described by Audu- America, Democracy in. M. Alexis de Tocqueville, Remarks on his Book, 758. Antique Greek Lament, by Mrs He- Audubon's Ornithological Biography, Boyton, Rev. Charles, deputed to repre Brüder, die feindliche, remarks on, 513. Bull, Fragments from the History of Change of Ministry, 796-Present Par- Surplus Revenues of the Irish Church, Chouan, the Land of the, 354. Conversations of M. Chateaubriand, 620. Devil's Gully, 319-Chap. XII. My Curse of Kehama. Character of Kailyal, Dana's Buccaneer, 416. Delta, Poem by him. The Child's Bu- Democracy in America, by M. Alexis de Devil's Gully, Cruise of the Midge, 319. Dunbar, his poems, edited by D. Laing, Early Called, the, Chap. I. By the Elections, remarks on the result of, 428. Exeter, Bishop of, and Lord John Rus- Faëry Queen, Legend of the Red-Cross Fall of Melbourne Ministry, 30. Father O'Leary's Sermon, 859. Fox, Character of his Eloquence, 173— Fragments from the History of John French and German Belles Lettres- Remarks on "La Magnetiseur, and German and French Belles Lettres, re- Goriot, Le Père, a true Parisian Tale of Hamlet, German Critics on, 236. Hollings, The Type of Prometheus, 651. not's Farewell, 233-Antique Greek How Swift is a Glance of the Mind, a Howitt, Mary. The Seven Temptations Huguenot's Farewell, a poem, by Mrs Ireland, Deputation from the Irish Pro- Jungfrau of Lurlei, the, 536. Kailyal, in the Curse of Kehama, her Keywest Pigeon, described by Audu- Laing, David, his Edition of Dunbar's Lamartine, M. de, notice of his Souve- Land of the Chouan, 354. Last Journey, the, 534. Lays of the Levellers, No. I., 446-No. II. The Grand Junction, 657. Legendary Tale, with very little lore, Liberal Whig, Letter from a, 125-His Magic Key, the, 391. Magnetiseur, La, Remarks on, 513. Michael Lynx, the man who knew him- Middle Ages, Stories of the, 505. Queen Midge, Cruise of the,-Chap. XI. The 980 Nights at Mess, Chap. IX., 225-Chap. Noctes Ambrosianæ, No. LXX. Re- Notes of a Traveller, by M. de Lamar- Nursery Rhymes-A Summary of the O'Sullivan, Rev. Mortimer, deputed to Old House in the City, 860. Ornithological Biography, Audubon's, Père, le, Goriot, a true Parisian Tale of Pilot Fish and the Shark, 908. clines to join the Rockingham Admi- - Prince Talleyrand, 76-Madame Dude- |