rarely reap the storm-as the fury of the populace progresses, more furious leaders are required, and some bold spirit from the crowd usurps the place from which some lingering principle or fear had driven its last possessorthe more reckless the man, the more fitted to be a leader. Thus, for so far, it has been in England-a Grey has been succeeded by a Melbourne; and it is more than hinted that, if the Destructives have their way, my Lord Melbourne must give way to Lord Durham. When we have got this far, the rest will be intelligible enough. Lord Durham will do his work, and will then be discarded for some one still more unprincipled, and still more ready, unhesitatingly, to sacrifice his conscience and his honor at the shrine of popularity.

We still look for further and speedy desertions. Neither Lord Lansdown nor the premier will, we trust, accompany their colleagues to the lengths which some of them are prepared to go. But it is now not from

the most interested motives that we express any solicitude of this kind. The transition of a powerful individual is of secondary consequence, at a period when all individual power is becoming from day to day less and less relatively to those forces which dwell in the consolidated masses of certain portions of the people, and are wielded by their leaders. But individual character is perhaps more important than ever and character it is never wholly too late to retrieve. Would that all such would reflect, that even their personal separation, when that stern resolve is taken, brings away but a part of themselves! There still remains the substantial impression which their weight has contributed to make the credit which it has given to a cause in the eyes of the coarse judgers and loose reasoners--nay, the presumptive argument against themselves, drawn from their long cooperation with those from whom they secede.

A dreary succession of changes from evil to evil is opened to our view by that alternative of our future policy, which includes the destruction of the Irish Church. How is it possible that ministers can suppose the cause of repeal will be checked, and not advanced, by the surrender of the

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Church? What friend to repeal now will then have become its enemy? Why, it is not even stated by any one of that faction, from Mr. O'Connell and Mr. Sheil downwards, that such is the case they do not even deign to insinuate the sufficiency of the destruction of the establishment, though they asseverate its necessity: they do not condescend to any profession bearing analogy, however remote, to that dastardly artifice which before the conces sion of the Catholic claims they and their friends incorporated into their tactics, the unhesitating declaration that the proposed concession would strengthen the rights of the church, and extinguish the very idea of repeal. Had they worn this mask, there would have been a primâ facie case in support of those Unionists who are church destroyers. It is true, it would have been only a prima facie case. But now-how is it possible to comprehend the policy of those who invite us to make an immense sacrifice for the purpose of conciliating men who have plainly told us they will not be conciliated by it?

On the other hand, what enemy to repeal now, will then have become lukewarm in the advocacy of his favourite measure? The day may come when the English government will find the Protestants of Ireland more powerful than they could wish. If their constitution be overthrown, and their consciences violated, then, we speak not the language of idle menace, but of sober and sorrowful probability, when we say, it may be that they will shrink with horror from that imperial legislature where not merely their selfish interests have been invaded, but that great confraternity of principles, which formed the real basis of their union with Britain, will have been basely cast away. Who does not know that such are Mr. O'Connell's calculations? The paltry sacrifice of the Irish Church is not commensurate with the largeness of his ultimate views. But he deigns to help it forward for its instrumental utility. Now let us put a case which is not improbable-the avowed establishment of popery in Ireland. All conscientious Protestants would deem such an establishment a gross violation not only of political but moral principle, an intolerable infringement

of those relations which, as a Protestant nation, we are bound to maintain towards our God. Now, in this case it is obvious that conscience can only be saved by a complete separation. And are there not many English Protestants who would say, "dear as is the Irish connection, which gave the means at least of strengthening and consolidating the empire, and, more than this, of spreading a pure Christianity, we will not retain it only to be involved in the responsibility and guilt of lending a direct sanction to a Roman Catholic church establishment; we must add all our weight to the scale of those who are endeavouring to repeal a compact now in our eyes contaminated by sin ?"

This, we may be told, is prejudice it is a prejudice drawn from the Bible. But even admitting this to be foolish, it alters not the case; it is with the existence, and not the wisdom of the feeling that we are concerned. That such a feeling does exist in the minds of many of the most influential in rank and station there can be no doubt. If the maintenance of the union be an object with the ministers, it is madness to provoke even the religious prejudices of the English nation into hostility against it.

But another topic arises in connection with this subject. Will the partition of church revenues in Ireland, according to the numerical forces of the different sects, extend to England? No, say the ministers. Yes, says Mr. O'Connell, not as we believe from any peculiar honesty or simple frankness, but because, as he avows, he thinks the time is now come for declaring his hostility to a peerage and an established church. (It is not yet arrived, for denouncing the monarchy-but will the interval be long ?)

We shall here, in elucidation of this part of the subject, draw a comparison which will probably surprise many of our readers.

Mr. Ward will not be suspected of an inclination to overrate the numbers of churchmen in Ireland. He takes them at 600,000. Lord Althorp's speech on introducing the Irish church bill in 1833, gave the tithe at £580,000. Mr. Mahony, whose authority stands high among the Roman Catholic party, in his pamphlet of this year on the

tithe bill, (p. 17,) declares that the clergy have not been in receipt of more than sixty per cent. of the gross amount. We speak here, be it observed, not of their rights, but of their receipts; and not of their real and known receipts, but of their receipts as estimated by an authority opposed to us. Their amount will be, at this rate, £352,000, or about eleven shillings and sixpence a-head for the episcopal Protestants of Ireland.

Now, in England (including Wales) the audacity of some dissenters makes them to estimate the churchmen as low as four millions. But say they estimate them at six-we believe nine would be nearer the truth, and certainly not beyond it; but then we should also put a considerable augmentation on the estimate for Ireland; and we are now applying the same rule to both, that of liberal calculations.

In the first report of the English church revenue commissioners, printed at the end of the past session, we find the following passage:-" "The total net income thereof (of the benefices,) will be three million two hundred and forty-eight thousand pounds." This statement is based upon actual returns from 10,498 benefices out of 10,701, with approximation for the rest. And thus we have for the English church, according to the same hostile estimate, an average expense per head in tithe, of about ten shillings and sixpence, one-eleventh less than in Ireland! How broad and tenable a ground for the Irish church destroyers to occupy as English church upholders!

A few words more on another point of interest, and we have done. It is, the probable manner in which the ministerial campaign of next year, as against the Irish church, will be conducted.

That portion of the warfare which is under the direction of Mr. O'Connell, and whose business it is to shake the foundation of all church property, will doubtless be, as it has heretofore been, in kind, though, probably, with increased fury. But a new engine will be put in operation. The results of the commission will have been known; and imposing phrases of astonishment will have been prepared to signalize the announcement of that which every

body already knows, the numerical inferiority of the Irish Protestants. Although we have reason to be fully persuaded that if the clergy of Ireland do their duty, in placing before the commissioners correct evidence as to the number of their flocks, the report of their investigations will present a result that will surprise alike the friends and enemies of Protestantism, as to the amount of Protestant population in Ireland.

How will the government progress from the fable to its moral? for indeed their commission is as hypocritical and dishonest as fable is when it professes to be fact, and its purpose as manifest in the back ground as the maxims of Æsop under the fine texture of his fictions.

On the one hand we have the determination, the known determination, of the representatives of the British people to invade the Irish Church; on the other we have the often manifested antipathies of that British people to a Roman Catholic establishment, in whole or in part; the memorable and remembered struggles of their forefathers and the suspicion of some, the hope of others, the exulting confidence of many more, that their character has not yet undergone so complete and bewildering a transmutation as to warrant the expectation that they will tolerate, without resistance, the reinstation of Romanism in its abused and forfeited ascendancy.

Take these opposite tendencies, neither of them little short of absolute certainty, as "equations of condition," they will greatly restrict the limits of our problem and facilitate its solution. They reduce the question to this form, how shall the ministry satisfy the commons without incensing the people? And this, we have no doubt, has been the question which has sometimes hovered as a terrible apparition before the imagination of Lord John Russell, which has thickened yet more hopelessly the cloudy perceptions of Lord Althorp, when they have thought of the session and the hustings-of Mr. O'Connell in the front, and the farmers of Northamptonshire in the rere.

We believe further, that they have found the answer, and the only answer, to that perplexing question. It is this: that they must give to Romanism some

covert but effective support: they must devise some plan, whose exterior shall be such as delude the people of England, viewing it from afar, by a specious name while its internal construction shall give to the Roman Catholics, examining it on the spot, sufficient assurance that the propagation of their faith, of their faith too as professed in Ireland, is now an object dear to the consciences or necessary for the convenience of the Protestant administration of Great Britain!

We do not love to assume the character of prophets but in the present instance it is of immense importance to the constitutional party, to to know, with some tolerable probability at least where they are to be assailed, and how. Now, combining those points we have already stated, with certain hints and intimations from Lord Brougham and Lord J. Russell, we cannot help entertaining a strong persuasion, that the charge against the Irish Church will be that it is of a partial and sectarian character, and the remedy proposed a comprehensive educational scheme, out of her funds, such as shall not avow the promotion of Popery for its object, but attain it as its result: most probably an extension of the present (misnanied) national education.

This has ever been the policy pursued by the enemies of Protestantism. Calculating upon the immeasurable credulity of her friends, they gravely tell us that every attack upon the integrity of national religion is designed to ensure its permanence and support its strength. All the safeguards of Protestantism have been removed, with the professed intention of rendering it more secure, and Popery has been strengthened and encouraged to prevent the church of England being injured by its power. It matters not that all past experience has shewn the utter folly of a system, the madness of which one would have thought was evident to common sense; there are still men who, in the face of all past experience-in the teeth of the experience which the melancholy history of the conciliation scheme presents for our instruction-still gravely tell us that the wisest way to maintain religion is to disregard its sanctions-the most prudent method of upholding the church, to confer power on its uncom

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promising foes; and still is Protestantism undermined in the name of friendship--every blow is prefaced with new and more extravagant professions of regard, and confiscation itself is represented as an act of the most disinterested love. There is a measure to human credulity, there is also a limit to human endurance--there may have been a time when the weak may have been deluded by the hypocrisy of religion's pretended friends; but that time is gone by for ever; the man who now affects not to see that modern liberality, "like the daughter of the house leech, will cry, give! give! and be not satisfied"that every concession is but a provocative to fresh demands-that the hope of satisfying Popery by any thing short of Roman Catholic ascendancy is utterly vain the man, we say, who now affects not to see this, is not a foolno! such simplicity is beyond the bounds of human folly-he is a knave. But the ministers will propose their plan for diverting the revenues of the Church of Ireland to the purposes of an unscriptural, that is, an infidel education board, and the House of Commons will hail the scheme with the reckless plaudits of unprincipled folly; And what will the Lords do? We know what they ought to do. They will throw out the bill-they will protect the church-they will maintain religion.

But is it not foolish in the House of Peers to link themselves to a falling cause and provoke the Commons to a collision? Dark hints have been thrown out of what may then be done, and the fate of the convocation has been held up as a warning to their lordships' house. We have no patience with those who speak thus. Are the peers of England to purchase a continuance of their rights by a renunciation of their exercise?-to continue to have the title of legislators by a virtual compact that they should never express an opinion? and preserve their existence by sacrificing their independence? Our able contemporary of the Standard (a journal to whose high talents and undeviating integrity the Protestants of Ireland owe a debt of gratitude that they never can repay) has dealt with this silly argument as it deserves. Who will care to preserve the House of Peers when they have become but a registering chamber for the decrees of the Com

mons? Let their lordships not be deceived-a servile dereliction from principle will alienate the affections of their friends, but never will disarm the hostility of their foes; they will gather fresh confidence from the cowardice of such conduct; they will know well the motive to which to assign this abandonment of duty; they will not mistake submission for conciliation; hating the peers as much as ever for their principles, they will despise them for the compromise.

And let not the peers imagine that even the Conservatives desire to see them maintained in their peculiar privileges one moment longer than they use those privileges in independence. No! we attach no talismanic influence to a coronet or a title—we venerate an hereditary legislature for its uses, not its name-and when by yielding avowedly to dictation that legislature vote themselves useless, we will not raise a murmur of disapprobation if any other body should see fit to vote them a nuisance. Away then for ever with the idea that the peers can even continue to bear the name of nobles by becoming slaves-to them, as to every one, honesty is the best policy-the path of duty is the place of safetyand expediency itself proclaims the madness of the course which would preserve the fortification by surrendering everything that it had been built to defend and, to secure privilege, would give up all that makes privilege worth possessing.

"Propter vitam vivendi perdere causas."

But all this the peers of England feel-and upon this feeling they will act-they will assert their own independence while they maintain the cause of God—and, in that God, whose providence has hitherto marked England a chosen nation, and has so often preserved her in the hour of danger, of foreign invasion or domestic convulsion, do we place an honest and an unshaken trust--that he will crown their efforts with success. HE, whose prerogative it is to still the noise of the waves and the raging of the people, will overrule to his church's good the plans of those who now take counsel together against her and though infidelity and popery go hand and hand-though a union be formed between those who