And what is the peace, or the prosperity, of the countries that have thus dipped their guilty gains in human miseries? They are three vast centres of feud and revolutionary terror;-Portugal, with an unowned monarch, reigning by the bayonet and the scaffold, with half her leading men in dungeons, with her territory itself a dungeon; and fierce retaliation and phrensied enthusiasm hovering on her frontiers, and ready to plunge into the bosom of the land. -Spain, torn by faction, and at this hour watching every band that gathers on her hills, as the signs of a tempest that may sweep the land from the Pyrenees to the ocean. And France, in the first heavings of a mighty change, that man can no more define than he can set limits to the heaving of an earthquake, or the swell and fury of a deluge. Other great objects and causes may have their share in those things. But the facts are before mankind.

The probable ground of Pitt's reluctance to crush the slave-trade at the instant, was his fear of disturbing the financial system, in the midst of a period which made all minds tremble at the name of experiment. While the whole fabric of empire was tottering, there might be rashness even in the attempt to repair the building; and it required higher feelings than are to be learned in the subterranean of politics, the magnanimity of religious faith,-to do' good without fear, and leave the rest to the great Disposer. The war had been altogether a war of finance. Pitt was, pre-eminently, a financier; and, like all men with one object perpetually before them, he involuntarily suffered the consideration of rents and revenues to distend on his sight, until it shut out every other. The abolition was a novelty; and he had seen a more auspicious novelty, a free constitution, overthrow the whole establishment of the most powerful kingdom of Europe. England was at that hour covered with the wreck of France; prince, priest, and noble flying from the brilliant evil.

The nature of its advocates, too, justified some jealousy; for among the virtuous and patriotic, there were to be found individuals scarcely less than avowed rebels to the constitution. None are more tolerant than they who scoff at all creeds alike; none more humane than they who have nothing to give; none more rigorous in demanding public sacrifices, than they who feel themselves exempt from all sacrifice. In 1792, the commencement of Mr. Wilberforce's efforts against the slave-trade, England was overrun with those cheap sages and heroes. The whole land was thick with a crop of spurious tolerance, generosity, and virtue. The slave-trade came forth a new topic, started in the fortunate hour, to cheer the sinking energies of popular outcry. It was the live coal on the lips of the seer, already weary of denouncing unperformed wrath against the throne. It supplied the whole bustling tribe of the Platos and Phocions of the streets with illustration, and it supplied them with it safe. The horrors of the trade threw an allegorical veil over the picture, while the artist was insolently limning the guilt and punishment of. supposed royal and aristocratic offences at home; the King of Dahomy prefigured a monarch, whom it was yet hazardous to denounce by name; the smiting of West, Indian planters by the popular hand led the mind's eye to loftier execution on more hated possessors of wealth and power; and the havoc of negro insurrection lent its deepest colourings to that promised tornado of vengeance, which," in an hour that we knew not of," was to sweep from the earth the nobility, church, and crown of the British empire.

Yet, it is to be lamented that, for the completion of a fame almost at the full, Pitt did not give more than his voice against the slave-trade; that he had not nobly dared; that by this solitary instance of hesitation in a cause worthy of himself, the illustrious act which shed glory on the close even of Fox's

struggling career was not permitted to scatter the darkness and sorrow which hung round his honoured death-bed, and finish in kindred splendour the long triumphs of the first statesman of the world.

CHAPTER XIII.

The Whig Cabinet.

THE Whig administration of 1807 totally failed, and deserved to fail. Its first announcement had struck the nation with surprise and scorn. Lord Grenville in alliance with Fox! was a coalition which none could comprehend, but on the principle of that all-swallowing avidity for place which degrades alike the personal and public character of the statesman. Lord Grenville, the direct agent of Pitt for so many years, the official opponent of democracy in all its shapes, the professional speaker against reform, the secretary who had dismissed M. Chauvelin and his republican peace with justified contempt, and who, with equal contempt, had denied the competence and will of the successive tyrants of France to make peace; was it possible that this man should now exhibit himself in close connexion with the antagonist of Pitt on every point of government, with the avowed reformer, the perpetual assertor of the sincerity of France, Fox, the orator of the populace, the champion of Jacobin peace, and the public admirer and panegyrist of Napoleon! The very name of a coaliton jarred on the public ear. It was the opening of a sluice that let out a whole torrent of scorn.

The national mind of England has never yet made. a wrong judgment. A whole people, furnished as England is with the means of knowledge, and the

invaluable freedom of expressing its thoughts, that true salt of the constitution, cannot err. It is preserved from error by something like those great contrivances of Nature which make the salubrity of the ocean and the atmosphere; the innumerable currents and diversities of public opinion, but preserve its activity, while they impel and guide each other into the general course of national safety and wisdom.

Fox's coalition with North was the original sin of his life. He never recovered from that first and fatal impression. Yet, there, little was to be compromised but the personal hostility. Here the hostility was upon all the principles of state; and no ingenuity of gloss, no declared perseverance in principle, and no ostentatious zeal for the good of the country could prevent the nation from looking on Lord Grenville as a fallen man; feebly attempting to cover with the remnant of his reputation the nakedness of whiggism; bowing down at the footstool of office a head to which old experience ought to have taught wisdom, if it could not teach dignity; and thenceforth worthless for all purposes, but the humiliating and melancholy one, of a warning to all who should in future be tempted by a pitiable appetite for power.

The acts of the new coalition were inevitably marked with the disgraces and tergiversations of its parentage. Lord Grenville was appointed first lord of the Treasury. But he had already secured the auditorship of the Exchequer, a place of four thousand a-year for life, and this he was determined not to give up, obnoxious as it must be to the most contemptuous reflections. The national voice demanded,-under what pretence Lord Grenville could retain two offices totally incompatible with each other? Why, in this instance alone, the disbursement of the public money, and the check on that disbursement, should be in the same officer? Why, with one hand in the public purse, he should pass his accounts with the other; be the supervisor over his

own conduct, and give himself a receipt in full for nis own integrity?

His lordship bore the storm with official philosophy-listened, and kept his four thousand pounds a-year. A poor attempt at evading public scandal was made, by appointing a trustee for the auditorship, whom his lordship was to pay; a rigid inspector, of course, of the possible irregularities of the man on whose money he was to live!

Another compromise followed, of a still more hazardous nature. To strengthen the administration, it had been deemed necessary to summon the aid of Lord Sidmouth's friends; and his lordship's terms were, two seats in the cabinet, one for himself and one for Lord Ellenborough, the Chief Justice of the King's Bench. This direct attempt to connect the ministry with the courts of law, awoke alarm throughout the empire. The practical value of the free constitution of England exists in the courts of law. If the legislature is the bulwark of English liberty; the purity and complete independence, pecuniary and political, of the bench of judges is liberty itself.

For,

as no constitution can be worth the paper that it is written upon while the subject fears for his person or his property, the first ground and security of national freedom must be in that majesty of law which protects him in doing all things that are manly, honest, and lawful. And it is thus that, while legislatures may have been weak, and ministers rash or arbitrary, the practical freedom of this first and most fortunate of countries has suffered no disturbance for a hundred years; has continually become more precious to its people; and has secured, and will secure, England from the desperate convulsions which the very impulse of nature forces on foreign lands, to give even a partial restoration to the powers of

man.

A motion on this most repulsive appointment was brought forward by Lord Bristol in the lords, and by