recourse to it will do well to study her receipts and neglect her denunciations. In these she has been misled by half-informed people, who, taking advantage of the sanitary movement, hoped to advance their own reputation by attacking that of the bakers. There are persons who are said to be afraid to move after studying anatomy for fear of deranging machinery so fearfully and wonderfully made. Those who gave implicit faith to the statements of Miss Acton would, we should conceive, be afraid to eat. No doubt there is a good deal of roguery practised, but the evil is not so great as she represents it. Nor can we doubt that her charges against the bakers of want of cleanliness are much too sweeping. Her accusations, indeed, are hardly compatible with some of her own statements. The purity of bread,' she says truly, can be preserved (even when it is composed of genuine ingredients) only by the utmost cleanliness in all the details of its preparation, and the absence of every unwholesome influence in the locality where it is effected.' No persons are better acquainted with this fact than bakers themselves, who pay dearly for the neglect of it, knowing by experience that the fermenting agency is not to be trifled with, and that without cleanliness it is impossible to produce a saleable bread. There are, however, some practices in occasional use which it is very desirable should cease. I have never,' says Cobbett, 'quite liked baker's bread since I saw a great heavy fellow in a bakehouse, in France, kneading bread with his naked feet. His feet looked very white, to be sure; whether they were of that colour before he got into the trough, I could not tell. God forbid that I should suspect that this is ever done in England!' In England, nevertheless, we have seen it done; and it is hoped that mechanical agencies for kneading bread will soon supersede the use of both feet and hands. ART. IX.—1. A Letter to Mr. Bright on his plan for turning the English Monarchy into a Democracy. From Henry Drummond. London, 1858. 2. Parliamentary Government considered with reference to a Reform of Parliament. An Essay. By Earl Grey. London, 1858. WITHOUT any pressure from the public, the leaders of all parties in the House of Commons appear to have acknowledged that the time is come for revising and amending the Reform Act of 1832. The anti-constitutional party of this country, 6 country, whose object is not rational and regulated freedom, but democratic ascendancy, have taken advantage of the admission to endeavour to awaken popular passion; and Mr. Bright has gone from town to town enforcing the most daring extravagance. His success, we are happy to think, has not thus far been commensurate with his ability. He has not succeeded in robbing the British people of their reason; and now that his new scheme of representation is before the public, its inconsistency, its gross partiality, and its contempt of justice, have called forth an almost universal condemnation. His scheme has, at least, one advantage, that it displays the objects of the revolutionary party without reserve. The basis of his representative system is numbers. The proportion of seats to population is the very soul of Reform.' Yet no sooner has he laid down this doctrine than he flings it over. Ireland, as Mr. Lowe showed in his honest speech at Kidderminster, should, on this theory, have fifty additional members. Mr. Bright gives it five! The English counties should have many more members than at present. Mr. Bright, out of 120 seats which he professes to apportion according to his principle, allots the English counties only eighteen. Even these eighteen are assigned to particular districts, for the avowed reason 'that there have grown up in them very large interests not exclusively connected with land.' In his opinion gentlemen, clergymen, yeomen, and farmers are not so capable of exercising the franchise as shopkeepers, hand-loom weavers, colliers, and ironworkers, and upon this ground, broadly stated by him, he declines to extend to them the same rule which he applies to the inhabitants of towns. He objects to some propositions which have been put forth by rival reformers, that they have been framed 'with the view of finding out modes by which to monopolise representation, instead of conferring it upon the citizens of the kingdom.' The sentence was hardly out of his mouth when he himself developed a plan of which monopoly was the essence. "The proportion of seats to population, which is the very soul of Reform,' ceases to be its soul the moment he gets beyond the chimneys of Birmingham and Manchester. The fallacics, misstatements, and ignorance displayed in Mr. Bright's speeches, have been so effectually exposed, that to revert to his arguments would be like stabbing the dead body of Hotspur. The project in which his declamations have resulted is so full of inconsistencies and absurdities, that to pull it to pieces in detail would be waste of time. The principle upon which it proceeds is more worthy of notice, because it is a doctrine. which has always been held by revolutionists, and is likely to have a permanence that does not belong to the ephemeral views and and reasonings of Mr. Bright. This principle is not the proportion of seats to population,' which Mr. Bright only enunciates to abandon. Pernicious and impracticable as is his pretended position, it would be less destructive than the plan to which it is a prelude. His real object is shown alike in the provisions of his bill and his open denial to the counties of their due share in the representation. He wishes to destroy territorial influence, and to give the power to towns. He would have England governed by citizens, and the upper classes by the lower. His ideas are the transcript of those which prevailed in the first French Revolution, and Mr. Burke's description of the views of the Republicans of that day might pass for a description of Mr. Bright's project of Reform: 'They are for totally abolishing hereditary name and office, levelling all conditions of men, breaking all connexion between territory and dignity, and abolishing every species of nobility, gentry, and church establishments. Knowing how opposite a permanent landed interest is to that scheme, they have resolved, and it is the great drift of all their regulations, to reduce that description of men to a mere peasantry for the sustenance of towns, and to place the true effective government in cities among the tradesmen, bankers, and clubs of bold, presuming young persons.' Mr. Bright, like these men, would abolish church establishments; he can see no use in a House of Lords, and believes that the public will arrive before long at the same conclusion; and it is the corollary, the necessary consequence of these doctrines, that he should desire to reduce the landed interest to a cipher, and get the government into the hands of cotton-spinners and mechanics. All who hate the nobility, gentry, and clergy-all who believe that property would be more secure, society more enlightened, religion more respected, liberality more extensive, if these orders of the community were supplanted by the multitudes of Manchester and Birmingham-will be consistent in cheering on Mr. Bright. Those who do not desire that everything which has been respected and venerated for ages should be swept away, and that the whole order of things should be turned upside down-the first put last, and the last first-will as certainly repudiate his revolutionary project. The scheme was tried in France, and all the world knows with what result. The measure of justice which would be dealt out to the conquered interests may be judged from the present demands of Mr. Bright. The daring defiance of all fairness in his treatment of the counties before he is triumphant, may be taken as an indication of what his dealings would be when success had crowned his efforts. He even violates his own principle of Reform the moment the landed interest is to have the benefit of it, and declares the counties undeserving of Vol. 105.-No. 209. the S the suffrage with the effrontery which in all times has distinguished the demagogue. Well might Wilberforce say, 'Let us never hope to win the democrats; they have ideal grievances and ideal advantages; they cry for liberty, but what they want is power.' The party in France who are the advocates of constitutional government look with eager and envious eyes to England as the proudest example of it that the world has yet seen. They have of late years more than ever observed it with attention, and commented upon it with intelligence. In their own country they have undergone both the evils of republicanism and the evils of despotism, and this has not only given them an ardent longing for the happy medium we enjoy, but a much more acute perception than commonly prevails in England of dangers which they themselves have experienced, and which seem less to us because we have hitherto escaped them. They are, therefore, of no light authority upon this question, and few among them deserve to be heard with greater attention than M. Montalembert,* who, from the circumstances of his birth, has a more intimate acquaintance with the people, language, and institutions of this country, than can often be possessed by a foreigner. He has pronounced beforehand on the scheme of Mr. Bright, and, though his words will be lost upon democrats, they will carry weight with thoughtful men, The small number,' he says, 'of electoral boroughs may still be reduced; but it will not be so without giving a proportionate equivalent to the agricultural representation; and as long as this proportion is preserved, nothing will have been fundamentally changed or shaken: but this would be different if the democracy should succeed in altering the present proportion by taking population for the only basis, and in conferring a preponderance of representation on the unsettled, over-excitable, and demoralised inhabitants of the towns; or, still worse, in assuming as the exclusive foundation of the national representation the delusions and extravagances of universal suffrage. Then, indeed, there would be a sure and early end of the Parliament and of the existing England. But let us hope that for this we have long to wait.' Nobody doubts that such unsettled and over-excitable' voters as M. Montalembert has described are fit instruments for a man whose avowed object is to overthrow the House of Lords and the Church. His means are in keeping with his ultimate aims, and all who do not desire to see the end of the existing England' will resist, unless they are afflicted with an intellectual infatuation, every attempt of Mr. Bright to put the entire country into subjection to the inflammable masses of the towns. The amount of their The Political Future of England, 1856,' p. 129. self-control self-control has been shown again and again in the formidable riots which have arisen in times of political excitement and commercial distress. The wild outbreaks produced by want may be regarded with a lenient eye; but a mob liable to such convulsions is not the body to which to intrust the keeping of the welfare of England. Mr. Bright asserts that he is willing to allow the House of Lords to remain, but his language betrays that he only grants them a respite till democracy has made a little further advance. The agitator who desires to pull down the aristocracy that he and his party may take their place and usurp their power will never be turned aside from his ambition and self-confidence. Men of this class attack whatever is above themselves, and by this symptom alone their true animus may be known. But there are others who, without any selfish and sinister end, overlook, from want of observation and reflection, the vast importance of an aristocratic element to the social fabric. Here again the enlightened portion of French politicians can testify how great is the blessing and how terrible the loss. M. de Tocqueville, one of the calmest and most philosophical of all the persons who have ever written upon the constitutions of empires, describes in his wise book on the French Revolution the consequences of the extinction of the order of nobility-describes it not from theoretical speculation, but from sad experience of the actual effects. He says that men in the countries which have suffered this calamity, being no longer connected together by any ties of caste, of class, of corporation, of family, are but too easily inclined to think of nothing but their private interests, and to sink into the narrow precincts of self in which all public virtue is extinguished. In such societies,' he goes on, every man is incessantly stimulated by the fear of falling and by eagerness to rise; and as money, which has become the principal mark that distinguishes one man from another, passes incessantly from hand to hand, and transforms the condition of families, there is scarcely any one who is not compelled to make desperate efforts to retain or to acquire it. The desire to be rich at any cost and the pursuit of material pleasure are, therefore, in such communities the prevalent passions. They are easily diffused through all classes, and penetrate even to those who had hitherto been most free from them, and would soon enervate and degrade them all if nothing checked their influence.' This, we repeat, is a picture drawn from the life and not from imagination. As the shopkeeping and mercenary influence would predominate when the aristocratic. influence was destroyed, so a shopkeeping spirit would overspread the land. As a general rule, men are compelled to respect them * France before the Revolution: Preliminary Notice, p. 20. s 2 selves |