at the very moment that they confess their past errors, they refuse to follow the light that they say sad experience is holding up before them; when all this is as notorious as the trafficking in seats, what impudence must that man have, who can talk of their" wisdom" in any way except in that of derision!

Here we see a set of men, who, in 1792, had titles and estates which they might not only call their own, but who enjoyed them unenvied and unhated. These men, because they would not grant the people the enjoyment of rights, which might have been enjoyed without any harm to the Boroughmongers themselves, contracted engagements, by which their estates became pawned for ever. This pawn, and a pawn, concurrently made, as to the labour of the people, are now at work upon the nation, plunging it in misery and driving it to distraction. There is a plain and easy remedy for the evil; but, this remedy (the only one) these men reject, and, while they reject it, punish the proposers of it; while they adopt remedies of their own, which all the rest of mankind see must fail of success.

The sun in the sky, the nose on one's face, the earth we walk on, nay, even trafficking in seats; neither of these is more clearly visible, than that it is a lessening of the quantity of the circulating medium, that has now produced the miseries of the country; and, yet, in the face of this ocular demonstration, these men are now taking measures for making the quantity of that medium less than it now is, and these measures they adopt with the avowed intention, not of adding to, but of wholly doing away those unparalleled miseries! I defy any man to produce a proof of want of intellect equal to this.

There are persons to say to us, "How is it likely that you should be "able to rescue the country from its difficulties, seeing that all these great men cannot do it ?" This has not only great force with the mass of mankind; but, with the far greater part of men, it is conclusive as to the point. How monstrous, however, is such a conclusion? These great men have been proved to be ignorant; they themselves acknowledge their ignorance; and yet it is presumed, that, because they cannot find a remedy for evils which have been produced from their ignorance, nobody else can find a remedy. This is never the case in the common concerns of life. There, when one man is found unable to do a certain thing, another man is sought after, and especially if the first has caused the affair to be placed in great hazard.

At this moment, in order to make the nation believe that the whole mass of Boroughmongers have not been ignorant as to the effects of the paper system, the BULLION REPORT of 1811 is referred to, and dead lawyer HORNER praised to the skies. But, that Report was a most complete proof of the ignorance of him who drew it up, as well as of all those who supported it. That Report, together with the resolutious founded on it, asserted, that the Bank was able to pay in specie (whether in peace or wa) within two years of 1811. Eight years have passed already, and five of those in peace; and these same wise persons have now resolved, and even enacted, I believe, that it is not prudent to attempt to cause the Bank to pay in specie for four years yet to come! And yet the nation is to be told of the wisdom of Lawyer HORNER and the Bullion Committee !

Let us hope, that the nation is, however, no longer to be deceived into a belief in the wisdom of these men. Let us hope, that many of those,

who, from whatever motive, have been opposed to a Reform, will now, or very soon, be for that sort of change; for, I am thoroughly convinced, that nothing short of that will afford us a chance of escaping such a convulsion as, perhaps, the world has never yet beheld. The Boroughmongers are wholly unable to adopt an efficacious remedy. The real and only remedy they are incapable of putting into practice. They may yield the point of Reform; and then there will be men able to apply a remedy; but, as long as they retain their usurped power, there can be no remedy applied. They are fools, or they would make a Reform instantly. They might then escape the danger that threatens them: but, as I have frequently said, conscious guilt makes them cling to power; and cling to it they will, till events force it from their hands.

Reverting now to your speech: what do you mean by complaining, that the system of 1797, that is to say, the non-payment system, seems to be intended to be abandoned altogether? What a foolish man you must be; or, what a strange perversion your mind must have laboured under for a long time past! The stoppage of 1797 was, in fact, a declaration of bankruptcy. It was a thing lamented on all hands. It was an evil, it was said, not to be avoided. It was a tem, porary expedient to prevent a total blowing up. And, now, behold, you call it a system; an excellent system; a system, the loss of which will be fatal to the country. So that, if a man be compelled to wear crutches for twenty years, he is to look with sorrow to the hour when he is to leave the crutches off. A white-swelling in the knee, or a wen in the neck, may, at this rate, become dear and valuable to the possessor; and to get cured of a fistula or a cancer may so afflict the party as to prey upon his mind for ever after. You have, Sir Robert, a singular taste. The humming of the spinning-jenny has, surely, addied your brains.

It is, however, wholly useless to argue with you. You must be left to follow your own course; and I have great satisfaction in being quite sure, that you can do nothing that will tend to save the system, even for an hour.

Sir JOHN SEBRIGHT was a little touched, to hear it said, that merchants, bankers, and traders, were the only persons who understood this question. He thought the land-proprietors were equally competent to judge on it. Poor Sir John! Your competence comes into life rather late in the day. You should have prevented Pitt, Addington, Perceval and Jenkinson, from pledging your estate and the earnings of your tenants and servants. These are now pledged; they are pawned to Baring, Goldsmidt, Ricardo, Ellice (or Elias, most likely), the patriot sent from Coventry; and to the fundholders in general. Lord Grenville has now, at this late hour, discovered, that "no man has any thing that he can call his own;" and this is what I have been saying for the last sirteen years. You have nothing, that you can call your own. Indeed, Sir John, you have no estate. It is pawned to the fundholders, sinecure placemen, and place-women, and to the whole race of pensioners. You hunt on the land that you call yours; you shoot over it; you ride about it; you think it is yours; but it is not. You are no more than a trustee or steward for the fundholders, the placemen and pensioners. Your business in life is to make the most of the property, and to pay over the proceeds to those who have the pawn on it.

This is but a sorry state for you to be in; but in it you must remain,

until such men as Mr. HUNT have the power to take off the pawn; and, then, unfortunately for you, you are afraid of such men as Mr. HUNT. You have suffered your estate to be pawned; and I assure you, that competent as your judgment may be, your power is not adequate to vacate the pawn. If your brother land-proprietor, Lord Folkestone, had presented my petition in 1818, you might have seen, on your own journals, the way to get rid of the pawn. He thought that petition " too long." To be sure it would have required nearly twenty minutes to read it. This would certainly have been a large draught on the time of the hole-digging assembly. Better employ that time in listening to the profound political philosophy of Castlereagh, or to the jesting of Canning, the beautiful alliterations of whom the nation had a specimen in his description of “ the revered and ruptured Ogden." It would have ben a pity, indeed, to attempt to take up a moment of the time of a set of Corn-bill-mongers; a set of hole-diggers; a set of new church builders; a set of Malthus poor-law grinders; a set of brown-bread philosophers; a set of Bankrestriction economists. This would have been a pity; and, besides, the petition might, if it had been on the journals, have prevented some of your bright and profound associates from putting forth their discoveries, during the last session, seeing that all those discoveries would have been already on record on their journals; and what is more, the king's printer might have been cheated of a famous job of printing; and the world might have been deprived of reports and debates, amounting to about ten octavo volumes of nonsense without a parallel in the whole history of letters.

Sir JOHN SEBRIGHT thought it necessary to apologize in some sort, for his applause of the conduct of Mr. HUNT, upon this occasion. He said, that he need hardly say that he was not amongst the followers of Mr. HUNT." But he was amongst them now. He did follow him. He did applaud him. He did adopt his opinions upon this all-important subject. Why, then, apologize? Was Sir John afraid to be thought right after all? If, however, he follows Mr. HUNT here, he must follow him all through the piece; for the is the point as to which Sir John will soon find the people are at open issue with the Boroughmongers. Sir John is wrong in his views, if he supposes, that it is a question between the people and the Bank. It is no such a thing. The fundholders, the sinecure-place crew, and the pensioned crew, have a pawn on Sir John's estate; and, the simple question is, will he continue to render an account and pay the proceeds to the persons who have the pawn, or will he accept of our aid in order to get rid of the pawn? If he will yield us our rights, he may get rid of the pawn; if he will not, his estate must soon go to discharge the pawn altogether; for things are now come to a pass that will not suffer him much longer to shoot and hunt over the land, in quality of trustee or steward. If the thing go to pieces before there be any change as to the representation in Parliament, the pawn will be most rigorously enforced; for, I, for my part, will join with the fundholders against the Boroughmongers, if these latter should still deny us our rights. Let them yield up those rights, which they withhold from us, and all will be right and safe.

Sir JOHN SEBRIGHT thanked Mr. PEEL and the MINISTERS for their intended measures. Poor man! Little did he dream, that those measures, if they were carried into effect, would not, in four years, leave him a single acre of land; and that, in far less than four years, they would not suffer

him either to ride or shoot. To pay the interest of the debt in specie would require the whole of the rents of the whole kingdom! Sir John would be reduced to bread and cheese and a smock-frock; and he would in a very short time, be duly qualified to join the "lower orders," and to be a follower of Mr. HUNT.

Now, Sir ROBERT PEEL, I care little whether you reflect on these things or not. I know well what is coming; and, if I have put your name at the head of this letter, it has not been to reason with you, but merely to point you out.

And, in this sort of way, I am,

Your humble servant,

WM. COBBETT.

TO THE EARL OF LIVERPOOL,

ON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE COUNTRY, AND ON THE MEASURES PROPOSED TO BE ADOPTED at the PRESENT TIME.

(Political Register, December, 1819.)

London, 8th December, 1819.

MY LORD,

Some years ago I had the honour to address a pretty long series of letters to His Royal Highness the Regent and to yourself, first beseeching you not to begin a war with the United States of America, and, when you had begun it, to make peace with that country as soon as possible. If my advice had been followed upon that occasion, it would, as is now notorious, have spared this country an immeasurable quantity of disgrace, and would have made the Debt, called national, fifty millions, at the very least, less than it now is. This is a fact notorious and acknowledged: known to every one conversant with politics, and denied by no one, who is conversant in that way, and who has the smallest regard for truth. Imagine not, my Lord, that I suppose, that the recollection of these things will have produced in the minds of you and your colleagues a disposition to listen to me and to attend to my reasoning and advice upon the present occasion. I know too well the workings of passion combined with power; I know too well the workings of that false pride which shuts our ears and blinds our eyes to that which at once produces conviction in minds where that pride does not exist: I know too well that you and your colleagues and the two Houses of Parliament have long seen that it is a plain question before the nation, whether my principles and my proposed measures shall be adopted or whether yours shall be adhered to: shun the avowal as long as you will, sheer off from the point of contact with what art you may, use allusions in place of names with what perseverance you like: still, after all, every man who

has turned his attention to these matters, not only in this kingdom but in America and in France, also, knows well that the grand question now at issue in this great country is, whether your system shall be persevered in, or Cobbett's system adopted in its stead. I know too well how far false pride will carry men; I have witnessed too many of the fatal effects of that false pride, to entertain the smallest expectation that passed experience will induce you to listen to, much less to adopt, any propositions coming from me. But, this I know, that the impression which has been made upon your system is chiefly to be attributed to my perseverance, to which the nation owes, that it understands, at any rate, the causes of its sufferings.

I shall, therefore, not be discouraged from going on in the same path that I have hitherto travelled in; and shall, upon the present occasion, take the liberty to address to you some remarks upon what I find in the Courier newspaper of the 1st instant, purporting to be a report of speeches, delivered by your Lordship, Lord Grenville and Lord Castlereagh.

On the state of the country, Lord Grenville is reported to have said that that state appeared to him to be more perilous than he had ever known it before. His Lordship, referring to the writings of Burke, which he called immortal, said that he agreed in opinion with Burke, that the causes of the discontents of the country existed before the epoch of the French Revolution. Now, my Lord, I fully agree as to this point in opinion with Lord Grenville. But, before I make further remark upon the real origin of the present troubles of this kingdom, let me observe that the very name of Burke; the very name of that man, whose main object was to crush all hope of Parliamentary Reform, by urging the country into a war against the then limited monarchy of France, which had adopted a system of free elections; that the very mention of the name of that man was calculated to awaken a train of ideas, which would naturally have terminated in a conviction that all his views were false. Because, the very sentence, into which his name is introduced, told their assembled Lordships that the man who was uttering that sentence, had found by experience, that a twenty-six years war and a Debt of eight hundred millions, together with rivers of blood and suffering such as the world never before beheld, had not at all tended to produce the effect which Burke had proposed to effect; for that the country was now more discontented and the people were more hostile to the existing system, than they were previous to the commencement of the war against France. It is said, that there is no mind able to resist the dictates of a life of experience. This, however, appears to admit of exceptions; for, we have had a life of experience. The last sixty years have been employed in endeavours on the part of the seat-patrons in England to uphold a system of taxation without representation. This is still the ground of struggle. And, as my Lord Grenville truly says, the parties are certainly more irritated and more determined than at any former period.

His Lordship, with a view, as I suppose, to show that peace or that plenty or prosperity had little to do with the matter, observed, in the words of Burke, that the causes of discontent had arisen before the French Revolution. True; but Lord Grenville omitted to say what those causes were, and when they had arisen. I will, therefore, take the liberty to do this, and when I have done it I think it will be as clear