the working of it is attended with a degree of expense that renders it totally unavailable, unless the amount of property in question is very considerable, and with a degree of delay that, whatever be the amount of property, is unavoidably productive of the greatest inconvenience, vexation and anxiety to the parties interested. This article has already extended to far too great a length to permit us to enter into the consideration of this important subject-the system of procedure in Equity. But in concluding, we may be allowed to express a hope, that in this age of reforms this most important subject will before a very long time has elapsed engage the attention of the legislature, and undergo such a thorough re-consideration and consequent reform, as shall render it a far more efficient instrument of justice than at present its warmest advocates can show or even affirm it to be.

ARTICLE VIII.

The Mirror of Parliament. Session 1842.

THE last session of the Imperial Parliament has been in many respects a most important one, perhaps the most important one for half a century. In all that constitutes the outward form and being of a session, it may not have differed much from its predecessors: clubs may have retailed as much gossip, and dinners have been as important an organ of party legislation as ever; houses may have been made and unmade much in the usual way, and country gentlemen have slept nearly as they were wont to sleep in less troublous times than those on which they have fallen. Yet, unless we greatly mistake the nature and scope of those deeper workings which soon impress their own peculiar character upon the surface of an age, this session will prove the starting-point for a new course of political life, and be but the commencement of a new series of combinations, whose complete results the present generation may not live to witness.

The return of a Tory ministry to power after an exclusion

of ten years, and their return with a majority which defies defeat and seems almost to render opposition hopeless, is in itself a fact of so grave a character as to merit the most serious consideration. It is in every way desirable that we should fully comprehend this startling event; that the gradual but sure and steady decline of the Whig party in public estimation should be studied, and the causes of their growing unpopularity thoroughly understood; above all, that the position of their successors, both in the House of Commons and in the country, should be carefully examined, and the important part which they have to play, well considered by all classes of the community.

These are no times to mince matters, or to salve over the sores which self-love sometimes derives from the contact of rough truth. It is a fact as indubitable as it is painful to all who feel that this empire owes them no small number of excellent measures, that the Whigs had attained the utmost limit of unpopularity in the country long before their complete overthrow in the House of Commons. That many of the measures to which this result was due were good in themselves, we shall not deny: far more we hope that, once enacted, they will be persisted in by Her Majesty's present advisers, and that the odium which they heaped upon the party that introduced, will not continue to embarrass the party that must uphold them. Setting aside all minor considerations, and especially those which have reference to the mere party manoeuvres of the House of Commons, we find three or four main causes to which we attribute the decline of the Whigs in popular favour; and these we think it necessary to point out, because their operation is not confined to the result which they have produced in the removal of Lord Melbourne and his friends from power, but will continue to exercise a most powerful influence upon the position and prospects of the present government.

It would be very difficult to assign a reason for the sudden and startling height which the demand for Reform reached at the moment when the Duke of Wellington seceded from power. The evils complained of were of no modern growth, any more than the determination to be freed from them. For years the old system of close and rotten boroughs had been

denounced and defended: Pitt, Fox and Charles Grey had laboured half a century before to overturn it: on this ground Canning and Brougham had measured swords: in short the question had never been suffered to slumber either in the house or out of it. The working classes had been continually stirred to demand what were called their rights, from the time when Cartwright first commenced his agitation, till the fatal meeting at Peterloo and the incarceration of Hunt at Ilchester. The middle classes had been appealed to on the hustings, at public meetings, in after-dinner speeches, newspapers, pamphlets and even sermons. Yet all this had failed at earlier periods to produce the extraordinary unanimity and general determination which manifested themselves in 182930. The accident of the French Revolution we hold totally inadequate to have caused, or even given, any very serious impulse to the general feeling.

The removal of Catholic Emancipation from among the questions that agitated men's minds, left a fair course for others of still more immediate interest. The more determined reformers had long denounced the whole dispute as a juggle, and foretold that no sooner was it disposed of, than the question of Reform in Parliament would become predominant. For once, a political prophecy did not fail: perhaps it prepared the way for its own fulfilment. But, be this as it may, it is certain that the repeal of the Catholic disabilities,-by setting a number of energetic intellects at liberty to fling themselves into a new course of action,-and the manner in which it was yielded, by proving the irresistible power of the people if roused and united,―gave the first most serious impulse to the new demand. It was the first great constitutional change that had taken place for years, and it had been wrung from reluctant power by organization, perseverance and unity of purpose. These then were the weapons with which to conquer other concessions.

It is not, however, at all easy to fuse down together the heterogeneous elements which compose our very artificial social system. Nothing perhaps but the wide-spread and severe distress, which pressed at once upon the agricultural and the industrial classes at that time, could have brought them to the astonishing unanimity which they then mani

VOL. XIV.-N°. XXVII.

fested, in attributing all details of evil to the one ultimate cause, a defective representation. No doubt many believed that in the correction of this lay the means of producing such further correction as they required in their manifold individual grievances; but it required something more immediately pressing than speculative opinions to unite all classes and all interests in one direction.

The demonstration of 1829-30 we believe to have had its origin with the working classes, although to the adherence of the middle class in the large towns especially, it owed the organization and direction which made it so alarming. The political unions were a complete supersession of the power of government: they wanted but little of the form and fatal character which distinguished the clubs in the first French Revolution, and threatened shortly to lead to a complete resumption by the people of the authority of the state. Under these circumstances, the aristocracy, then represented by the Tory government, found it necessary to give way, and the Reform Bill-"The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill !" -became the condition on which Earl Grey assumed the conduct of affairs.

Of the fate of that measure, of the wide liberality of its original draught, and of its emasculation first in the Cabinet, then in the Imperial Parliament, we are not called upon to speak in detail. Enough, that it was finally carried by a wellunderstood compromise between the parties in the House of Commons to which it had been entrusted, in place of the National Convention which would probably have resulted from a longer resistance on the part of the owners of boroughs. Quite enough was done to give the measure the just title of a revolution, quite enough was left undone to disappoint a great majority of those by whose efforts the revolution had been brought about; for although it was urged that the new arrangement was one based upon the ancient rights and privileges of the people, and in short a return to the constitutional system of earlier days, it was still clear, that, even admitting the truth of these assertions, prescriptive rights fortified by long enjoyment, parliamentary acknowledgement and judicial decisions, were swept away as of no avail whatever. Nor is it to be forgotten that many asserted

with far more truth, that the principles introduced by the Bill were totally new, and that, however desirable they might be thought, they had no foundation whatever in the early constitutional law of the empire. The extension of the suffrage then to the ten-pound householders in boroughs stopped far short of what had been contemplated by the multitudes who had taken part in the agitation, and particularly by those among whom it took its rise: while other points, such as the division of the country into electoral districts, and the secret voting for members of parliament, found no place in the Bill at all, although they had very long been insisted upon by a majority of parliamentary reformers, and were at that time extensively popular. But one effect, which had unquestionably been foreseen, resulted from the compromise: the middle class found itself in possession of much of what it sought; it had gained its ends for itself, and it asked no further question as to the fate of its allies. In truth it may be suspected that it secretly rejoiced in being free from a competitor which circumstances had proved strong, and other circumstances might render dangerous. The middle class therefore, in general, withdrew from the associations, and these left to themselves soon lost their effective organization and apparent power. In the midst of the universal jubilee, the epinicia of the middle class for their victory, was born the CHARTER, a document containing nothing more than had often been demanded before, but whose very existence was the protest of the working classes against what they called the treachery which had been manifested towards them. And with the Charter was born also that deep feeling of hostility to the new burgesses which has since put an almost impassable gulf between the two most important classes of the community.

That the Whig ministry should become obnoxious to a full share of that hostile feeling was to be expected: they had been placed in their exalted and powerful position upon conditions which had not been fulfilled; and not only this, but their very popularity among the new constituencies were the causes of profound hatred among the multitudes whom the Reform Bill excluded. To this reason then we attribute the first downward step of the party in popular esteem. It was