Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846. Various
I do not see the means of bringing it to that conclusion by this resolution, (Lord Lansdowne's motion on the Catholic claims.) I agree with the noble and learned Earl (Eldon) who has recently addressed your lordships, that we ought to see clear and distinct securities given to the state, before we can give our vote in the affirmative of the question. My noble relative says, that our security will be found in the removal of the securities which now exist. I say, that the securities which we now enjoy, and which for a length of time we have enjoyed, are indispensable to the safety of Church and State! I should be glad to see the disabilities of the Roman Catholics removed; but before I can consent to their removal, I must see something in their stead which will effectually protect our institutions."
Yet, within one twelvemonth! the Popish Bill was carried by the Wellington ministry! Its immediate result was, to introduce into the legislature a party whose aid to the Whigs carried the Reform Bill. The Reform Bill, in its turn, introduced into influence a party who demand implicit obedience from every minister, and whose declared object, at this hour, is the abolition of the whole system of commercial, manufacturing, and agricultural laws, under which England has become the greatest commercial, manufacturing, and agricultural country in the world. All power now threatens to fall into the hands of the populace; and, if that result shall follow, England will be revolutionized. With all our knowledge of the strength of England, of the vigour of educated opinion, of the gallant principle existing among our nobles and gentlemen, and, above all, of the religious integrity of a large portion of the empire, we still cannot disguise our apprehension of general change. The ferocity, recklessness, and insatiability of the democratic spirit, have been hitherto withheld from the sight of our fortunate country, by the vigour of our government and the wisdom of our laws. But they exist; they lie immediately under the surface of the soil; and, once suffered to be opened to the light, the old pestilence will rise, and poison the political atmosphere.
The agriculture of England is the true treasury of England. We may exist with diminished manufactures, and we must prepare for their diminution, from the universal determination of other countries to manufacture for themselves. But we cannot exist without food; and, from the moment when the discouragement of tillage shall leave England in necessity, we shall see the cheap corn of Russia and Poland taxed by the monarch, raised to a famine price, all the current gold of the country sent to purchase subsistence in Russia, and our only resource a paper currency, followed with an enormous increase of expense in every common necessary of life. Throw a fourth of the land of England out of cultivation, and what must become of the labourers? They now complain of low wages; then they will have none. What must be the condition of Ireland, wholly agricultural, and ruined by a flood of foreign corn, at half the price for which the Irish farmer can bring it to market? These consequences are so notorious, that nobody attempts to dispute them. They are coolly taken as inevitable things; and the whole dependence, even of the mob advocates, is upon chance: "Oh, something will turn up! Things won't be so bad as you think!"
But the true conspirators see deeper. They know, that a revolution in the food of the people is the immediate forerunner of a revolution in the state. From the moment when foreign corn is admitted free of restraint, the confidence of the farmer must be shaken. From the farmer, the shock will instantly reach the landlord; his rent must be diminished. To one-half of the great proprietaries of the kingdom, a diminution of rent, even by a third, would make their possessors personally bankrupt. Their mortgages and loans must be repaid; and nothing would remain. The landlord now pays the Church. If he is ruined, the whole Church income, independent of the small portions of glebe land, must perish with him.
Then will come the agitation for a still more daring purpose. It will be asked why must the system of English life be artificial? – Because we have twenty-eight millions sterling of interest to pay, and for this we must have taxes. But, why not sweep the national debt away, as France did in her day of royal overthrow? A single sitting of the Convention settled that question. Why not follow the example? Then will come the desperate expedient, and all will be ruin on the heads of the most helpless of the community; for the national debt is only a saving bank on a larger scale, and nine-tenths of its creditors are of the most struggling order of the empire.
Of course, we do not anticipate this frightful catastrophe under the existing government, nor, perhaps, under its immediate successors, nor under any government which knows its duty. But, let the "pressure from without" be once an acknowledged principle; let agitation be once suffered as a legitimate instrument of public appeal; let the clamour of the streets be once received with the slightest respect, and the game is begun; property is the chase, the hounds are in full cry, and the prey will be torn down.
We believe that the majority of the empire are honest and true, but we know that faction is active and unscrupulous; we believe that there is in the country a genuine regard for the constitution, but we know that there are men within the circumference of England, whose nature is as foul as that of the blackest revolutionist of France in 1793; whose craving for possession is treacherous and tigerish, whose means are intrinsic and unadulterated mischief, whose element is public disturbance, and whose feverish hope of possession is in general overthrow. Against those we can have no defence but in the vigour, the caution, and the sincerity of the national administration.
The Marquess Wellesley, on the formation of Lord Grey's cabinet in 1830, accepted the office of Lord Steward. He had begun his political life as a high Tory, and the friend and follower of Pitt. – In 1793, he had fought boldly against the Reform question. This was at the period when he retained the generosity of youth, and the classic impressions of his university; but he had now been trained to courts, and he became a reformer, with a white rod in his aged hand! In 1833, he was re-appointed to the government of Ireland; he returned full of the same innocent conceptions which had once fashioned Ireland into a political Arcadia. But he was soon and similarly reduced to the level of realities. He found confusion worse confounded, and was compelled to exert all his power to suppress "agitation," and exert it in vain; a Coercion Bill alone pioneered his way, a quarrel in which the Irish Secretary was involved with the Agitator, produced the resignation of the secretary, Littleton, though the Marquess's son-in-law. – Lord Grey, like Saturn, rebelled against by his own progeny and overthrown by the impulse of Reform, resigned, (July 9, 1834.) The Whig government fell within the year, and the Marquess left Ireland. In England he condescended to accept the office of Lord Chamberlain; but, within a month, retired altogether from public life. It was full time: he was now seventy-five.
The East India Company, in 1837, voted him £20,000, and in 1841 honourably proposed to place his statue in the India House. His remaining years were unchequered. He died in Kingston House, Brompton, on the 26th of September 1842, in his eighty-third year.
The Marquess Wellesley, on the whole view of his qualifications, was an accomplished man; and, on a glance at his career, will be seen to have been singularly favoured by fortune. Coming forward at a period of great public interest, surrounded by the most eminent public men of the last hundred years, and early associated with Pitt, the greatest of them all; he enjoyed the highest advantages of example, intellectual exercise, and public excitement, until he was placed in the government of India. There, the career of every governor has exactly that portion of difficulties which gives an administrator a claim on public applause; with that assurance of success which stimulates the feeblest to exertion. All our Indian wars have finished by the overthrow of the enemy, the possession of territory, and the increase of British power – with the single exception of the Affghan war, an expedition wholly beyond the natural limits of our policy, and as rashly undertaken as it was rashly carried on. The Marquess returned to Europe loaded with honours, conspicuous in the public eye, and in the vigour of life. No man had a fairer prospect of assuming the very highest position in the national councils. He had the taste and sumptuousness which would have made him popular with the first rank of nobility, the literature which gratified the learned and intelligent, the practical experience of public life which qualified him for the conduct of cabinets and councils, and the gallantry and spirit which made him a favourite with general society. He had, above all, a tower of strength in the talents of his illustrious brother. Those two men might have naturally guided the councils of an empire. That a man so gifted, so public, and so ambitious of eminent distinction, should ever have been the subordinate of the Liverpools, the Cannings, or the Greys, would be wholly incomprehensible, but for one reason.
In