ing as metaphysical, and in their natural and unperverted tendency they are ennobling and exalting. Some such studies are wanted to counteract the operation of legal studies and practice, which sharpen, indeed, but, like a grinding-stone, narrow whilst they sharpen.

November 19. 1831.

ABOLITION OF THE FRENCH HEREDI

TARY PEERAGE.

I CANNOT say what the French peers will do; but I can tell you what they ought to do. "So far," they might say, " as our feelings and interests, as individuals, are concerned in this matter if it really be the prevailing wish of our fellow-countrymen to destroy the hereditary peerage-we shall, without regret, retire into the ranks of private citizens: but we are bound by the provisions of the existing constitution to consider ourselves col

lectively as essential to the well-being of France: we have been placed here to defend what France, a short time ago at least, thought a vital part of its government; and, if we did not defend it, what answer could we make hereafter to France itself, if she should come to see, what we think to be an error, in the light in which we view it? We should be justly branded as traitors and cowards, who had deserted the post which we were especially appointed to maintain. As a House of Peers, therefore, as one substantive branch of the legislature, - we can never, in honour or in conscience, consent to a measure of the impolicy and dangerous consequences of which we are convinced.

"If, therefore, this measure is demanded by the country, let the king and the deputies form themselves into a constituent assembly; and then, assuming to act in the name of the total nation, let them decree the abolition. In that case we yield to a just, perhaps, but revolutionary, act, in which

we do not participate, and against which we are, upon the supposition, quite powerless. If the deputies, however, consider themselves so completely in the character of delegates, as to be at present absolutely pledged to vote without freedom of deliberation, let a concise, but perspicuous, summary of the ablest arguments that can be adduced on either side be drawn up, and printed, and circulated throughout the country, and then, after two months, let the deputies demand fresh instructions upon this point. One thing, as men of honour, we declare beforehand — that, come what will, none of us who are now peers will ever accept a peerage created de novo for life."

November 20. 1831.

CONDUCT OF MINISTERS ON THE REFORM BILL.

THE present ministers have, in my judgment, been guilty of two things, pre-emi

nently wicked, sensu politico, in their conduct upon this Reform Bill. First, they have endeavoured to carry a fundamental change in the material and mode of action of the government of the country by so exciting the passions, and playing upon the necessary ignorance of the numerical majority of the nation, that all freedom and utility of discussion, by competent heads, in the proper place, should be precluded. In doing this they have used, or sanctioned the use of, arguments which may be applied with equal or even greater force to the carrying of any measure whatever, no matter how atrocious in its character or destructive in its consequences. They have appealed directly to the argument of the greater number of voices, no matter whether the utterers were drunk or sober, competent or not competent; and they have done the utmost in their power to rase out the sacred principle in politics of a representation of interests, and to introduce the mad and barbarizing scheme of a delegation of individuals. And they have

done all this without one word of thankfulness to God for the manifold blessings of which the constitution as settled at the Revolution, imperfect as it may be, has been the source or vehicle or condition to this great nation, without one honest statement of the manner in which the anomalies in the practice grew up, or any manly declaration of the inevitable necessities of government which those anomalies have met. With no humility, nor fear, nor reverence, like Ham the accursed, they have beckoned, with grinning faces, to a vulgar mob, to come and insult over the nakedness of a parent; when it had become them, if one spark of filial patriotism had burnt within their breasts, to have marched with silent steps and averted faces to lay their robes upon his destitution !

Secondly

they have made the king the prime mover in all this political wickedness: they have made the king tell his people that they were deprived of their rights, and, by direct and necessary implication, that