failed; ministers seemed to impart the contagion of their fears to a majority of the lords and commons. At the close of February, the constitution was suspended, and lords Liverpool, Sidmouth, and Castlereagh, assumed over Englishmen, the same power which they had so often denounced as odious, intolerable, and tyrannical, when exercised by the French jacobins, under the name of Loi des suspects.

London was represented as the great focus of conspiracy; and yet no new culprit was discovered. The Spafields rioters-Watson (the elder), Preston, and Hooper were raised from imprisonment as misdemeanants, to the dignity of traitors committed to the Tower. Thistlewood, who, like young Watson, fled from the capital charge, was apprehended, and also committed to the Tower, under a charge of treason. Lord Castlereagh lent his Irish experience to the passive mediocrity of lord Liverpool, and to the inhumanising terrors which beset the heart or overwhelmed the understanding of lord Sidmouth. It was chiefly in the manufacturing districts that the ministry executed the conservative vigour of its suspicions and incarcerations. Government emissaries, and spies, sent down from London in the guise of delegates, prowled among the starving people. Such miscreants will make conspiracy where they do not find it. An atrocious system of stimulating and suborning crime, for the purpose of denouncing it, and, where this failed, supplying its place by perjury, soon prevailed. It is true that the assemblages and proceedings of the starving populations in the great manufacturing towns demanded the utmost vigilance

of government, and the strong arm of the law. A large body of the people of Manchester formed the despairing, rather than the traitorous or seditious resolution of supplying themselves with each a blanket, and a few days' provision, for the purpose of proceeding unarmed to London, with a petition to the regent, setting forth their distress. They were to be joined by others from Stockport, Macclesfield, and Knutsford. This melancholy rather than formidable march* had hardly commenced, when the blanketeers, as they were called, encountered the yeomanry and regular troops, and were either taken and imprisoned, or dispersed. But a government of ordinary firmness and capacity would have met this danger, and much more, with the powers confided to the administration by the established law of the land. The fears and weakness of the ministry, the disposition to abuse extraordinary powers inherent in local magistrates and the subalterns of party, and the profligate arts of spies and informers, filled the jails with objects of suspicion or alleged crime. Many were soon released as arbitrarily as they were imprisoned. Those who were prominent as leaders or declaimers at the meetings of the populace were detained, and in many instances removed for custody to the prisons of London.

It is a relief to draw the curtain upon these de

* "Nothing," says a Macclesfield newspaper of the day, "could be more wretched and pitiable than the condition of the few who reached this town; some actually fainting from weariness; and all of them without baggage, or any apparent resource with which to proceed 20 miles farther towards ondon."

T

plorable remembrances, and pause for a moment upon a motion, but above all upon a speech, made at this period, in the house of commons, by Mr. Brougham. On the 13th of March he submitted to that house four resolutions on the state of the nation. The speech with which he introduced them is invaluable, perhaps unrivalled, as a historic record of facts, combined with meditative sagacity and vast acquirement. After sketching the state of the country by broad and prominent traits of the decline of trade, and the privations and endurances of the people, he exposed the false system of commercial economy upon which parliament had long legislated, and taught those principles of commercial science which, adopted afterwards by the more enlightened of the ministry, repealed the navigation law, and liberated trade. "The period," says the speaker, "is now arrived, when, the war being closed, and prodigious changes having taken place almost all over the world, it becomes absolutely necessary to enter upon a careful but fearless revision of our whole commercial system, that we may be enabled safely, yet promptly, to eradicate those vices which the lapse of time has occasioned or displayed; to retrace our steps, where we shall find that they have deviated from the line of true policy; to adjust and accommodate our laws to the alteration of circumstances; to abandon many prejudices, alike antiquated and senseless, unsuited to the advanced age in which we live, and unworthy of the sound judgment of the nation." Adverting to the navigation law, he says" But, whatever may have been the good policy of the navigation

law, I am quite clear that we have adhered to its strict enactments a century after the circumstances which alone justified its adoption had ceased to exist."

The eloquence of this speech, not in the characteristic manner of the speaker, is another signal proof of the versatility of his powers. It is the eloquence of history, or of deliberative counsel, rather than that of dialectics and debate. The writer of these pages cannot resist the temptation to enrich them with the following passage, referring to the infant republics of South America:

"Surveying, then, the derangement which pervades every branch of the public economy; seeing how our trade is cramped by the short-sighted operations of an unenlightened and senseless policy; finding what trifling relief; and that little accompanied with serious obstructions, it has derived from the prosperous condition of our foreign affairs; we may assuredly affirm, that there never was a period in the vicissitudes of our fortunes, when British commerce might, with so much truth, be said to labour for its existence. Casting our eye over every point of the compass, and scarce able to descry any from which a solitary ray of comfort or of hope breaks in, it is natural for this house, to whose hands the sum of affairs is committed — for our unfortunate brethren, suffering under distresses that baffle description, after bearing us, by their industry and their patience, through the late eventful struggle for the whole population of the empire, exhausted by the drains of a protracted warfare, weighed down by the pressure of intolerable

public burdens which it has accumulated, and now cut off from the temporary relief which the unnatural monopoly of that war afforded; it is, I will say, but natural and reasonable for us all to direct our expectations towards any untried resources, any new opening that may present itself to the industry of the community. There can be no field of enterprise so magnificent in promise, sowell calculated to raise sanguine hopes, so congenial to the most generous sympathies, so consistent with the best and the highest interests of England, as the vast continent of South America. He must, indeed, be more than temperate, he must be a cold reasoner, who can glance at those regions, and not grow warm. The illustrious historian*, who has described the course of their rude invaders, relates, if I mistake not, that when, after unparalleled dangers, amid privations almost insupportable, through a struggle with sufferings beyond endurance weary, hungry, exhausted with the toil, scared at the perils of their march they reached at length the lofty summits, so long the object of their anxious enterprise, they stood at once motionless, in gratitude for their success, in silent amazement at the boundless ocean stretched out before them, and the immeasurable dominion spread beneath their feet, the scene of all their fond expectations. And now the people of this country, after their long and dreary pilgrimage, after all the dangers they have braved, the difficulties they have overcome, the hardships they have survived, in something