Time and the world have wrought; weeping to Own sion, unsurpassed powers of oratory, boundless I know we are not as we were; I know How much, alas, of my past self is dead! charge in a rather equivocal way; while his crack The public opinion of England is formed and guided by the gentlemen of England-by the men who, whatever their fortune, rank, or profession, have cultivated minds, a manly courage, and an ever-watchful sense of honor and decorum. Their influence may be traced in our foreign as in our domestic policy-in the Quixotic scrupulousness with which England rejected all share in the spoils of Europe at the congress of Verona; in the anxiety that all nations should share the opened commerce of China. Honor, then, to the English gentleman. If you ask where is the source of England's greatness, Mr. Cobden will say, its manufacturers-its men to whom the bank of England would gladly lend two millions; Mr. Gladstone, its church; the Duke of Buckingham, its landed proprietors; and Cobbett (if alive) would have said, its bold peasantry. And all of them are entitled to their share of credit: but the true English gentleman, wherever he is found or whatever his pursuitwhether pleading causes, spinning yarns, feeding prize-oxen, shooting game, or poring over books -is the real upholder of England's might. VERSES TO AN OLD FRIEND. WE will not meet again, old friend of mine! The spell thy memory can about me cast. Even since those old days wherein we met, We ne'er could be again, if each should see, How little of the past remaineth yet. No, no! It were not well to learn how strange, I How little of all this thou now would'st find! ་ would be still to thee the same as then- A joy and comfort; o'er the dreary sea When time flowed sweetly as a hymn divine. We will not meet again; for though I've clung, We culled, like blossoms, when we two were young, Many have wither'd in the duller beam Old friend of mine, we must not meet again! Losing the comfort thy remembrance gives; That through life's trials thou hast nobly sped, And still thy lofty faith has lived and lives. Forgive, if this be so, for I am weak With many care-worn thoughts, and full of fear We will not meet, and all that thou hast been From Fraser's Magazine. POLICY OF THE BRITISH MINISTERS. be supposed that the trade and commerce of the country were neglected. Very far from it. English silks were saved from the competition of Ir is a strange feeling that comes over us when, foreigners by import duties, which amounted to a for the first time in our lives, we find ourselves prohibition. English cotton and woollen goods, upon the descent of the Brenner, or the Simplon, English cutlery, porcelain, hats, shoes-everyor any other precipitous mountain-road, especially thing, in short, of home manufacture, was proif, on the right hand or the left, there be a fright-tected; not by the skill of the fabricators, but by ful chasm, into which a single jib or a start by the interference of laws, which closed the home the horses must inevitably plunge us. No mat- market against strangers. Meanwhile the shipping ter how firm our confidence may be in the skill of interests, the West India interests, the Canadian the driver; no matter how decided the postmaster's interests, the East India Company's interests, were assurances touching the steadiness and amiable all bolstered up as stoutly and carefully as the tempers of the beasts that drag the carriage. Our votes of houses of parliament could do it. Protecnerves tingle and our breath fails us as often as tion, indeed, was the order of the day ;—protection we suffer our vision to wander down that horrible to life and property by the free use of the gallows pit, which seems yawning to receive us; and, in to the church, by a steady depression of Dissenters; spite of the sublimity of the scene, we are forced to commerce and navigation, by a thousand restricin the end-that is, supposing our constitutional tive duties; to the aristocracy, by a careful denial temperament to be a delicate one-to lean back in of representatives to populous places, and a tender our seat and close our eyes, committing ourselves, fostering of such constituencies as were found in in a sort of collapse, to fortune, or to providence, Gatton, Sandwich, and Old Sarum. And the faintor to any other invisible, but resistless, agency est intimation of a desire to change that system, esthat may be in favor, to do with us exactly what pecially in regard to the election of members of parit will. liament, was denounced as symptomatic of those levelling views which are directed constantly and with eagerness towards a democratic form of government. We are not prepared to say that, with feelings altogether similar to these, the great Conservative party, who brought the present ministers into The great principle of the Liverpool administrapower, regard at this moment their own position tion may be described as the "Do-nothing princiand the proceedings of their master. There is ple." "Let well alone," was their favorite maxmuch of hope mixed up with the alarm which im; and, as long as it continued to be well, pergenerally pervades them. They are satisfied that haps a little longer, the vis inertia was kept in the coachman is skilful in his vocation, and has steady operation. There were, however, even in nerve enough for anything. They admit, likewise, the Liverpool cabinet, men to whom a state of that his style of driving is suitable to the path on absolute rest was not a state of absolute happiness. which they have entered; and, therefore, trust, Canning, and Huskisson, and their friends, desired and, indeed, believe, that they will be carried change; and, though faithful to parliament as it through the pass without sustaining hurt; but it then existed, and as much opposed to reform as would be absurd to deny that they heartily wish the duke himself, they forced their colleagues into themselves out of it. The whole scene, and their the repeal of the navigation-laws, as well as to the own plight in regard to it, is so new, so unexpect-general admission, that wherever a system of recied, that they are at a loss how to sustain the ner- procity could be established, free-trade offered vous agitation that is caused by it. Let us drop this metaphor, however, and in plain, downright English, set forth what we mean to say to the readers of Regina, leaving them to draw their own inferences from the facts which may be brought before them; for of facts, more than of theories, it is our intention to speak. greater advantages to all parties than its opposite. For this, however, the old tory party hated them. How eloquent were the Standards and Morning Heralds of those days in their denunciations of measures which persons of greater weight in the country than they felt to be but the beginning of an end! And how gallant, too, was the resistance of the tory section in the cabinet. Catholic Emancipation! the repeal of the test and corporation acts! free-trade! the theories of political economists! the very sound of the words fell like discord on the ears of the Eldons and Peels of the period of which we are speaking. And so it came to pass that, till the liberals, as they were called, had, by the hand of death or otherwise, been purged wholly out of the cabinet, no steps were taken to innovate seriously upon arrangements which custom had matured, and to which long use, it was supposed, had reconciled the nation. Time was when the watchwords of the Tory party were in England, "Our glorious Constitution in church and state;"-in Ireland, "Protestant Ascendancy," with an occasional reference, especially after dinner, to "the pious, glorious, and immortal memory of- no matter whom. We speak now of days when Sir Robert Peel was a young man-a subordinate in that ministry of which the late Earl of Liverpool was at the head, and John, Earl of Eldon, lord-chancellor of England, the main prop and stay. Then was Mother Church not only mighty, but rampant. Then was the statute-book graced by enactments which denied Another peculiarity of the times of which we to Papists all the privileges of citizenship, save are now speaking, ay, and of days less distant, protection to life and property alone; and rendered was, that the worst kind of taxation was asserted it incumbent on such as might aspire to seats in to be that which makes its appeal directly to the the house of commons to have received at least pockets of the payers; which takes money, aponce, previously to the day of election, the sacra-parently for nought, and so renders the state a ment of the Lord's Supper in the church of the copartner in every man's earnings and property. parish where they might be resident. The agri- Assessed taxes men brought themselves to endure, cultural interest, too, was in high favor then; for the ports were closed against foreign corn, till after the price of that grown at home should have exceeded eighty shillings per quarter. Nor let it 11 L. LIVING AGE. VOL. V. though not without an effort; because they bore exclusively upon luxuries, and were paid on account of conveniencies which the payers, if they chose, might do without, and which were con spicuous to the world. But even assessed taxes | government felt this, and acted upon the convicwere not popular with the statesmen who imposed tion. Warned by the total failure of the policy of them, and were retained on no other plea than that their predecessors, they determined to hazard a of dire necessity. Hence soap, candles, tea, sugar, complete change of system, and they were enmalt, beer, wine, bread, salt, leather, dye-stuffs couraged to do so by the assurance that dwelt -every article, in short, of consumption, every upon their minds that their will would be accepted necessary of life, to the poor as well as to the rich, as law by the nation. How, indeed, could the bore its burden. And the arguments of such as case be otherwise? Their majorities in the two ventured to hint at a different arrangement were houses of parliament were overwhelming. True, met, first, by the assertion that there was no injus- the measures which they had considered and matice in the arrangement at all; and next, that if tured were not likely to please their own friends, there were, it was better that men should pay to or, at all events, some of them. But what of that? the state through their grocers, their hatters, and Their friends dare not leave them, for, if they did, their shoemakers, than through the most unpopu- the consequence would be an immediate return to lar of all public functionaries, the common tax-office of the clique towards whom they had taught gatherer. Well do we remember, so recently as themselves to feel as Hannibal felt towards the the year 1829, when an honorable gentleman, now Romans. And as to the opposition, first, they in parliament, suggested a change in regard to this were numerically too feeble to be much accounted matter, that his proposition was met by the minis-of; and, next, they must become false to their ter with a brevity and vigor of expression which own principles, and so degrade themselves in the had more the air of determination than of cour- eyes of the whole world, if they refused to support teousness about it. However, time was running attempts, which it was assumed that they had his ceaseless course all this while, and changes meditated, perhaps yearned and longed to make, of various kinds came round upon his chariot- but which, well knowing the strength of the party wheels. that would have gainsaid them, they had not hardihood, perhaps patriotism, enough to propose. The putting down of the repeal movement in Ireland, with the trials, bungled as they were, that followed, were measures entirely after the good old tory heart; there was no reserve in the applause wherewith that master-stroke of policy was greeted. But may we predicate as much in regard either to the tariff of 1842 or the imposition at that time of an income-tax? Perhaps not. Nevertheless, the measures were proposed and carried; and the conservatives, or tories, felt that, from that hour, the ground on which they used once upon a time to stand was no longer tenable. Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Eldon, and their party, refused to take office under Mr. Canning, because he was avowedly favorable to the removal of what were called the Catholic disabilities. The old tory party praised them for this on their retirement, and bore them back again with loud shouts, after the death of Canning and the weakness of his successors opened to them once more the gates of Downing-street. They came into office one year, and the very next test and corporation acts and Catholic disabilities went by the board. Had they taken another step in advance, we are not prepared to say that they would have insured to themselves a perpetuity of power; but there can be no doubt now that their The original tariff and income-tax were speedily proceedings in the matter of the East Retford followed by enactments more and more indicative question, followed up by the duke's memorable of the fact that "old things were passing away," declaration against parliamentary reform, were the that "all things were become new. Ireland proximate causes of that terrible convulsion, from must be quieted; the demand for a repeal of the the effects of which this country has not yet re-union must be put to silence; and there were but covered. The whigs came in, and with them the two means whereby this end could be accomtriumph of liberal principles, as far as it suited the plished. Half a century ago, or less-may we convenience of professed liberals to broach these not say five-and-twenty years ago, at the utmost? principles; yet the whigs neither dared to speak the Irish people would have been told that, if of endowments for the Roman Catholic church in they persisted in disturbing the public peace, they Ireland, nor dreamed of revolutionizing either the should suffer for it. And suffer for it they would commercial or the fiscal arrangements of the em- have done. For, unless our memory be much at pire. Many changes they certainly introduced fault, the Duke of Wellington in the lords, and Sir into the constitution, properly so called, of the Robert Peel in the commons, gave to all concerned country; but the manner of working it in detail, something like a pledge to this effect, when, in the system of management in the several portions 1829, after passing the emancipation act, they of the United Kingdom, the church, both here and declared, "that, should the measure unfortunately elsewhere, and, above all, the principle of taxation, fail of producing the results which they anticipated these, when compelled to quit office, they left from it, they would be the first to ask from parliapretty much as they had found them. Let us see ment such powers as should enable them to vindiwhat has befallen since; and how a conservative cate the outraged majesty of the law." Now we cabinet, backed up and supported by the most need not say that, if by the language which they then powerful party that ever forced its chiefs into held, our illustrious leaders intended to prophesy office, has, in regard to these matters, comported a long season of content and submission in Ireitself. land, they proved no more than that they had not been gifted with the art of vaticination. Ireland has never been so turbulent, so entirely unmanageable, as since the Roman Catholics carried that point, the surrender of which was counted upon, ere the event befell, as the sure forerunner of peace, and plenty, and gratitude, and the very height of loyalty, in that portion of her majesty's dominions. However, it would be unfair to keep There is no denying that the present government took office at a period of extraordinary danger and difficulty to the country. Disastrous wars abroad; seditious movements, but little removed from rebellion, at home; ruined commerce, and a revenue falling off from quarter to quarter; all bespoke a state of things which was not to be met by common measures of amendment. The new out of view that many other causes than the one have contributed to produce this. Thirteen or fourteen years of whig management, during which the government depended from week to week for its existence on men avowedly hostile to all the established institutions of the country, could not fail of creating in Ireland a spirit which we do not know how to describe, lest we should seem to labor under the influence of a delusion. It is enough when we remind our readers that the tables were turned with a vengeance; that it was no longer Protestant, but Popish ascendancy which sober-minded men found cause to dread; that laws yet unrepealed were violated openly, and the violation sanctioned by the authorities of the day; and that the consequence was a thorough dislocation of the whole framework of society. How the whigs can have the effrontery to speak of the repeal movement as originating in the return of the tories to power would, indeed, surprise us, if anything that occurs in party strife were a legitimate cause of wonder to the lookers-on. The repeal movement was in full operation long before the weakness of Lord Melbourne's cabinet had become apparent beyond the limits of parliament, and would have operated far more effectually than it did, either at Clontarf or anywhere else, but for the providential removal from the sovereign's councils of men who, let their intentions be as upright as they might, were without power to carry them into execution. There was no alternative to Sir Robert Peel, in reducing Ireland to a state of rest and comparative obedience to the laws, except either to govern with a rod of iron, or to conciliate the great body of the people, by behaving_generously to them on their most tender point. To effect the former, he must have prevailed upon parliament to suspend the constitution in the sister island, and to coerce and restrain its inhabitants by martial law, and an army of 150,000 men. Now, apart from all considerations of moral right and moral wrong, these are arrangements much more easily talked about than accomplished. We do not believe that a proposal of the sort would have been listened to in either house; we are very sure that in the present cabinet there is not a man who ever dreamed of making it. For, be it observed, that there is no doing work like this by halves. You must have penal laws against the Roman Catholic religion, otherwise failure is certain. You must go back to the days of William III., or the Duke of Cumberland, and treat Papists as these worthies treated the Episcopalians of Scotland, each in his generation, reäcting the massacres of Glencoe and Culloden, only on a larger scale, or you will do nothing. Now neither Sir Robert Peel nor Lord John Russell would tolerate such things. How, then, was the minister to act? that they are wrong. And now behold what follows! The queen's speech having lightly paved the way, the minister seizes the earliest opportunity of announcing that the education of candidates for holy orders, according to the rites of the Roman Catholic church in Ireland, shall henceforth be carried on at the public expense. Fed, clothed, and boarded by the public these young aspirants for the cowl and the tonsor may not be; but all the appliances of learning are to be provided for them out of a grant from government; and Maynooth, enlarged and enriched, yet no wise remodelled, either in its constitution or privileges, is to be the scene of their religious and intellectual training. The carriage has taken another dash downwards. Safe we still believe it to be; but there is a chasm close to the road, over which it makes us dizzy to gaze, though we cannot shut our eyes to it. Sir Robert Peel does right in facilitating the better education of the Irish Roman Catholic priesthood. Till this is done, and benefices assured to them afterwards, less repulsive to good taste, good feeling, and personal independence, than the contributions of the poor, it is vain to expect that gentlemen will become ministers in the church of the majority in Ireland. Plenty of talent there will always be, with some scholarship -not much; some slight acquaintance with the dead languages, and an abundant stock of bigotry; but Maynooth as it was, and the P.P. parishes as they are, never could have produced such a body of priests as should deserve the respect of the higher orders, or become guides to the lower in those moral duties of the present life which best fit men for happiness in another. Indeed, it is a well-known fact, that ever since Maynooth was established, the characters of the Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland, and their influence for good, have steadily deteriorated. We are old enough to remember the Romish priests of the old school, men of good families and liberal views, who, trained at some of the foreign universities, most of them at Douay in France, brought back with them to their pastoral office at home, not only the manners, but the feelings and desires of well-bred gentlemen. Not one of them now remains. Mr. Pitt's horror of republican principles, having been barely strong enough to come between the Irish gentry and the foreign education of which we are speaking, gave them Maynooth in its room, and so stinted the gift, that it ceased to have value in the eyes of any except the sons of the peasantry. It was a charge against Jeroboam, who "made Israel to sin," that he "took of the lowest of the people, and made them priests of God." The selfsame accusation lies against the founders and supporters of Maynooth up to the present time; for verily the priests which go forth from that seminary have all been taken from the very lowest of the people. And here let us observe, that we are arrived at the summit of the Brenner pass. We know that it is necessary to descend; yet it would be ridicu- And here the question arises, how far has Sir lous to deny that the first movement which the Robert Peel judged wisely in continuing to Maycarriage makes towards the plains of Bavaria agi- nooth a monopoly, so to speak, of the education tates us exceedingly. The charitable endowments of young men designed for the service of the bill was a bold measure. We praised it at the Romish church in Ireland? If Maynooth was to time, and we repeat our praises now; but it cer- be continued at all, the wisdom of largely increastainly made us, and, we suspect, the whole tory ing the grant for its maintenance does not admit party, feel queer. In Ireland it has wrought of a doubt. But the real problem to be solved is, much good, not unmixed with a little evil. We why should this seminary be kept up? Doubtless are sorry to see that our Protestant brethren there there are good reasons for this, of which we are too much denounce it. We can make many ignorant. Probably the minister, having made up allowances for them, but in this we are satisfied his mind to do a gracious thing, put a further re straint upon his own wishes, in order that it might | own vicars and rectors, to hold property as corbe done with as much grace as possible. And, if porations whole, so long as time shall last. Moreit be true that the Roman Catholics of Ireland pre-over, if we do not negotiate directly with the fer the present to any other arrangement that pope, we give a sanction to the promulgation of could have been made, there is an end, we pre- one of his bulls in this our Protestant realm; and sume, to all argument on the subject. But these very much rejoice to find that it enjoins on the are points which we do not find ourselves bound Romish clergy that, which all our laws failed to to take for granted; and, therefore, heartily going command-an abstinence from political agitation, along with him in the animus by which he is and the steady devotion of their time and talents swayed, we feel ourselves at liberty to doubt the to the duties of their calling. And, lastly, that wisdom of the minister's actual proceedings. other symptoms of change may not be wanting, the head of the party which so long resisted emancipation proposes a grant of many thousands annually for the better education of Roman Catholic priests; and, if not cheered, is certainly not turned round upon or denounced by the party for having done so. If we Protestants be right in our belief that men continue Papists only through ignorance and prejudice, it surely seems to follow that we should desire as much as possible to communicate to them the knowledge which they lack, and to overcome their prejudices. Now the obvious method of accomplishing this end is to make them as much as possible sharers in our own system of education. We do not mean to argue that, either in England or in Ireland, it could be desirable, or even just, to throw open to Roman Catholics, or Dissenters of any kind, the endowments of our colleges, which are, by their constitution, inseparably connected with the Established Church. But why there should not be in Great Britain, as there is in Prussia, universities with mixed faculties, wherein men of both creeds might pursue their general studies together, going to their respective professors of theology for theological instruction, is what we have never been able to comprehend. Let us not be misunderstood. The English universities have so completely departed from the spirit, and, indeed, the form, in which they were founded, that to append to either a seminary wherein members of the church of Rome might pursue their studies, is impossible. But the same objection does not apply to Dublin, far less to any new university which government might found, and pious individuals foster, in other parts of Ireland. And we frankly confess, that the adoption of some plan of the sort would have been more acceptable to us than that on which the minister seems to have determined in regard to Maynooth. At the same time, we do not condemn an arrangement of which we cannot see all the bearings, or even the sources. If it be true, for example, as we know is asserted, that by the terms of the act of Union the government is bound to support Maynooth, then has Sir Robert Peel come to a wise determination, in adding to the amount of the grant annually made to it. But was he likewise bound to keep it precisely as he found it? Could he not, even now, add a Protestant college to the college as it exists-giving to both higher privileges, and placing both upon a better footing? So much for deeds actually done. We have, under a tory government, recognized the Church of Rome in Ireland as a church. We speak no more of ministers of the Romish persuasion; but, in commissions issued from the crown, address ourselves to "The Most Reverend Archbishop Murray," and "The Right Reverend Bishop." Again: We pass an act of parliament whereby pious individuals professing the Romish faith are empowered to endow benefices, and build Roman Catholic places of worship, at their pleasure. Thus an end is put to that fiction in law which denied the existence of the Church of Rome within these kingdoms. So far from prohibiting the Romish clergy to officiate in public, we permit them to become bodies corporate; and, like our Are we annoyed at all this? Do we blame it? By no means. Sir Robert Peel is pursuing, according to our poor judgment, the only course which holds out a prospect of peace for Ireland, and, as a necessary consequence, for the United Kingdom. He is acting justly towards the majority, and with exceeding policy towards the minority, of the population of Ireland. But we acknowledge, nevertheless, that we are on a rapid descent on the hill-side, and that our nerves are somewhat shaken by it. Who will undertake to give a pledge, that in ten years, or twenty at the most, the Roman Catholic Church shall not be established in Ireland? Be it so. This is the risk. And, if it do come, we must try to make the best of it. But we are not at all disposed to say that it must come. And now let us look a little to other matters. It is not in regard to churches and to the education of the people alone that the wheel is going round. It seems to us that the financial system of the country is in the balance. Formerly, men's theory was, that indirect taxation was greatly preferable to direct taxation. We may be wrong; but we fancy that this notion is, with many others, getting out of date; and, on the whole, perhaps properly so. The income-tax has been repewed for three years; and, that no doubt may remain touching the minister's design of desiring a further renewal, when these three years shall have expired, an amended tariff keeps pace with the arrangement, and trade is set free from a great many more of its shackles. Export duties are to be levied no more. Raw cotton, and other elements of manufacture, are to enter our ports duty free; and glass, and we know not how many fabriques besides, rejoice in an exemption from taxation. Sugar, also, one of the great necessaries of life to the poor, is to be so lightened, that it shall pass from the grocer's shop into the cups of the consumers at something about one penny farthing per pound cheaper than it used to be. And the grand result is, that the trade of the country is to be relieved from the pressure of three millions of annual taxation, for which the income-tax, though taken at five millions, will, according to the estimated expenditure for the ensuing year, barely compensate, with a trifling balance in favor of the exchequer of ninety or a hundred thousand pounds. The minister has not said, of course, that at the termination of three years he will certainly propose a further prolongation of the income-tax. On the contrary, he cheers the house with the same sort of assurance that he gave them three years ago, namely, that whenever the finances of |