the people ask for? They do not ask for any one thing, in the obtaining of which you are not as deeply interested as they are. They do not ask for your property to be taken from you; they do not ask for your rents to be reduced. On the contrary, they ask for that which would prevent your total ruin and the annihilation of your very names. Your conduct is most surprising, and not to be accounted for upon any supposition short of that of the existence of an almost self-devotion to destruction. You have seen a law passed to make a tax on your land perpetual; then, upon the back of that, you have seen another passed, under the name of a redemption of that tax, to make you purchase the tax, or to enable the Government to sell it to any body else. And, thus, you have been compelled to purchase back part of your own estates, or to sell a part of them, in order to prevent the Government from selling to other individuals a rent-charge upon the whole. In some instances the right to receive the tax has been bought by individuals; in others, you have sold part of the estates entailed upon your sons, in order to buy the property in the remainder. And, in all this you appear to have very quietly acquiesced! You now hear your rents attacked; not by the people, but by some of the correspondents of the Board of Agriculture, which Board is a Government Board, and maintained at the public expense. Rents! These persons complain of your high rents; and the propose, that they should be reduced. They say, that high rents are:h cause of the national misery, taking care to keep the debt and taxes and change of currency out of sight; and if they mean any thing practical, they must mean, that you ought to be compelled to lower your rents; or, in other words, to surrender another large part of your estates! And yet, you appear to feel no sort of alarm at proceedings and propositions like these! You, wise men that you are, are not to be awakened to a sense of danger by any thing but the expression of the people's wish to have a voice in the choosing of those who are to make laws and impose taxes!

That, if no change take place, your estates will pass away from you is not now attempted to be denied by any one who has the ability to put pen to paper. And, yet you remain stagnant as the weeds of Lethe! The operation of the funding and army system upon your estates is just as visible as the operation of lading water out of one bucket and putting it into another; that is to say, it is thus visible to all eyes but yours; for, if it were visible to you, your conduct would denounce you as downright idiots. You see your incomes fall off; you see your tenants ruined; you see all the labourers become paupers; you are compelled to shut up your windows, to turn off your servants, to lay down your horses and carriages, to hang or drown your dogs, to cease all hospitality, and, finally, to abandon to the rain, the wind, and the bats, the mansions in which you were born, and which, only in your immediate fathers' lifetimes, were scenes of plenty, hilarity, and happiness. You slide into some patched-up farm-house and vainly hope, by assuming the occupation, to share in the profits of the farmer; or you hide your diminished heads in some gaudy box, where art is at strife with nature, in the skirts of the metropolis, and where, instead of the voices of your hounds, you are cheered with the rumble of the convenient short coach which takes you to steal your politics while you are snapping up your dinner; or, unable to endure this degradation in the land of your forefathers, you decamp to some foreign shore, where, while you linger out, in a state of voluntary

exile, a life of shabby gentility, your children imbibe the rudiments of that mongrel education which well prepares them to wander through the world, cursed with poverty and pride, loaded with contempt, and bereft of the benefits of compassion.

All this you know; all this you see before your eyes; all this many of you are now actually experiencing; and yet not a hand, not a tongue, have you moved in order to get rid of the cause of your ruin! If there be ten men composing a community; if each has a certain portion of property; if two out of the ten contrive, by any means, to appropriate to themselves a certain large part of the property of the other eight every year; is it not clear as day-light that, in a very few years, the two must have all the property, and, of course, the eight have no property at all? And yet you will not see that the tax-gatherers, who take a large part of your incomes and hand it over to the placemen, the pensioners, the grantees, the fundholders, and the army, are actually engaged in such a transfer! You will not see this; but you see dreadful dangers in a Reform of the Parliament, which would very nearly put an end to the transfer!

Well! but you do see it. You see it and feel it. You know that, in a short time, you must be ruined if no change take place. The delusive hope that it is a sudden transition from war to peace has been dispelled; you see that the cause is as permanent as the sixty millions of taxes and the eight or ten millions of poor-rates. You do, at last, confess that the loss of your estates, of which I warned you more than ten years ago, has taken place in part and is now upon the eve of consummation. You wish not to be wholly stript. You would, if you could, save the remnant of your property. Why, then, do you not join the people, who, with undivided voice, are praying for that change, which they look to as the only means of affording effectual present relief and future security, and which certainly is as necessary to you as to them?

The press of corruption call upon you to keep aloof upon these grounds. They say, that the standing army is necessary to preserve the peace of the country; that the present amount of civil list, sinecures, pensions, grants, and salaries is also necessary; and that to reduce the interest of the debt would be a breach of national faith and a robbery.

Now, the Reformers say, and I for one, that a Reform would cause the peace of the country never to be broken, or attempted to be broken, except in such a trifling degree as to be easily restored by peace-officers. We say, that, as to sinecures, pensions, &c., a Reformed Parliament would reduce them to the standard of strict public services. We say, that, as to salaries and pay, they should be reduced in the proportion in which the wages of labourers and mechanics and manufacturers have been reduced. We say, that, if we were to stop here, the drain upon your estates would become much less than it is. But, I am not for stopping here. I am for making that reduction of the interest of the debt, which has been stigmatised as a breach of national faith, and, by others, as a robbery; and, I will endeavour to prove, that it is neither one nor the other.

At several of the public meetings it has been resolved, that the debt is not national; that those only owe the money, who have voted for those who borrowed the money; and that those who have filled the seats owe the debt. Witnout attempting to enter into this question at present, I shall proceed to say, that those who have lent their money to the Govern

ment were the best judges of the security they received for repayment. They very well knew, that they had no other security than that which the power of collecting a sufficiency of taxes gave them; and, the simple question is, whether, in order to collect a sufficiency of taxes, the nation is bound to hazard the very lives of a great part of the people. I say, that it is not; I say, that the safety and happiness of millions is to be preferred to the safety and happiness of thousands; and, I say, that this is a principle that is consonant with every notion of justice and humanity.

But, let us look a little into the facts of this case. There are some of the fundholders, who lent their money in a currency, one pound of which was equal in value to a pound of the present day; but, all those who lent the Government money after the stoppage of the Bank in 1797, lent no such a thing. They lent a paper-money of inferior value; and now, when the currency has been again raised in value, is the nation bound to pay the lenders as much of this paper as they lent of an inferior paper? If the lending had been in pieces of gold of one ounce weight each, would it be a robbery to make payment for ten pieces in five pieces of two ounces weight each? If the lending had been in bushels of wheat at 9s. a bushel, would it be a robbery to make payment for ten bushels in five bushels at 18s. each? And, though the price of wheat is now more than half what it used to be when the money was lent, this is merely owing to a short crop, and, if we take all the articles of produce, lean stock, meat, wool, flax, and corn, they do not sell for half the price they sold for when the main part of the money was borrowed. And yet they call it robbery, if we do not continue to pay two for one!

Nor had the nation any thing to do in changing the value of the currency. The Governor and Directors of the Bank Company were bound by law to pay the amount of their notes to the bearer upon demand, in gold and silver. They issued such large quantities of notes, that, in 1797, when the holders of the notes went for payment, the Governor and Directors went to Pitt, and told him their fears for the safety of their concern. Pitt procured an Order of Council, authorising them to refuse to pay their notes! This was all unlawful; but, the Parliament passed an Act to protect the Governor and Directors and Pitt and the Council against the consequences of this great and memorable breach of the laws. This Bank Company are amongst the very greatest of the fundholders, and they cry aloud about breach of faith, about robbery, because Mr. Preston and others have proposed to pay them no longer the value of two bushels of wheat for the value of one bushel of wheat !

The Bank paper, including the country paper, which depended upon that of the London Bank, has now been more than half drawn in. Whose fault was that? Not the nation's. The nation had no hand in the stoppage of 1797, nor had it any hand in drawing in the paper. The whole has been done by those who manage the paper-money; and yet, the nation at large are to be called robbers, if they assert that they ought not to be wholly ruined by the operations of these managers!

Let us take the case of the common day-labourer. Infinite pains have been taken by the sons of corruption to persuade the labouring classes, that they do not pay any part of the Debt. Oh, no! great care is taken these corrupt men tell them, not to tax THEM. Great care is taken, to lay the weight upon the shoulders of those who are able to bear it. Great care is taken not to make the poor man contribute

towards the support of the splendid sinecure placeman and pensioner; and these corrupt men say, that the war, having been carried on for the protection of property, men of property are, and ought to be, liable to pay the interest of the debt, which was contracted, that is to say, the money that was borrowed and expended upon the war. If this really were the case, and if the taxes paid by you and your yeomanry cavalry tenants, did not at all affect the labouring classes, it would be a matter of much less consequence than it is. But this is not the case. The press of corruption tell the labouring people a gross and wicked falsehood when it tells them that they are not taxed. They are taxed, and pretty handsomely too. The malt, beer, leather, salt, sugar, tea, tobacco, soap, candles, and spirits, of which the farmer's man, the artizan, the mechanic, and the manufacturer and their families consume, and must consume, a very large part of all that is consumed in the country; these articles all pay a heavy tax, and, indeed, the taxes raised upon the malt, hops, and beer alone, amount to a greater sum, and a much greater sum, than the taxes on all the land, and all the houses, all the windows, all the carriages, all the horses, all the servants, all the dogs, and all the other taxes imposed on the rich and not on the poor. Let us, however, come to the proof; for this is a great matter. Let me go to the book; the book of all books, the book of taxes! Here I have it before me. It is an account of what the Government received from the people in England, Scotland, and Wales, during the last year of our lives. It received, for the above-mentioned things, as follows:

So that the beer, hops, and malt alone, which are chiefly used by those who are called the "lower classes," pay nearly one-fourth part more every year than all the land, houses, windows, and the other things just named. And yet the corrupt press would fain make the labouring classes believe that they pay no taxes, and that great care has been taken not to lay any burdens upon those who are not well able to bear them! And, this is the reason, forsooth, why the poor ought not to have a vote at elections!

But, I am wandering from the point immediately before me, which was to show how the common day-labourer stands affected with regard to the Debt. The expenses of the Government may be divided into two heads:-First, the army, navy, civil list, pensions, &c.; and, Second, the debt. The taxes required to pay the army, navy, &c., amount to about twenty-two millions a year; and the taxes required to pay the interest of the debt to about forty-four millions a year; so that the charge for the debt is twice as great as the charge for every thing else. The commonest day-labourer pays in taxes, according to Mr. PRESTON'S computation, ten pounds a year, if he earn eighteen pounds a year, and, of course, his ten pounds are divided nearly as follows:

Now, when the greater part of the debt-money was borrowed, the labouring man used to receive at Botley from 15s. to 18s. a week; and he now receives only from 9s. to 10s. a week. And, if we reckon the time that he now loses for want of work, which used never to be the case, his wages have, in fact, especially if we include the want of work for his wife and children, been reduced one-half. And is he still to pay the 61. 13s. 4d. a year on account of the Debt? When the debt-money was borrowed, it took only about eight weeks' wages in the year to pay his portion of the charge for the debt; but now it takes sixteen weeks' wages in the year; and the fundholder can have these sixteen weeks' wages for the same quantity of money that he could have had eight weeks' wages when the debt-money was borrowed. And yet they call it a robbery to reduce the payment from sixteen weeks' wages to eight weeks' wages! Nay, they call it a robbery to reduce the fundholder one per cent., that is to say, they call it a robbery to give him more than the amount of twelve weeks' wages for the eight weeks' wages which he lent to the Government! This they stigmatise as a robbery ; this they call a breach of national faith; against this they cry as loudly as parson Parks cried, the other day, against the "horrid and diabolical plot," which he had discovered in a hackney-coach, and which consisted, I suppose, in the entwining of ribbons of colours red, white, and blue!

It is impossible to take this view of the matter and not to be convinced that things cannot go on in their present train for any length of time. The question, therefore, is not, whether all shall remain as it is, or a change take place; for a change of some sort must take place; and, the only question is, of what sort that change shall be.

I believe, that most men are convinced, that, if a Reform of the Parliament had taken place in 1792, we never should have seen a war against the people of France; that we should have suffered that people to settle their affairs in their own way; that we should not have expended million after million on the Bourbon fugitives and French aristocratic and ecclesiastical emigrants, while our own list of paupers was increasing at so dreadful a rate and that we should never have heard of votes for monuments to commemorate the glory of having restored the Bourbons and the inquisition. I believe that most men, high as well as low, are now convinced of this. I believe also, that the same conviction prevails as to the impossibility of sufficiently reducing the expenses of the country, and, of course, the taxes, without a Reform. At any rate, the people, the great body of the people, are now most thoroughly convinced, that their miseries can never have an end, until this Reform shall take place. They now clearly see what are the real causes of their sufferings; they see that they arise from taxation and the management of the paper money; they have too much sense to believe that soup-kettles can form a permanent establishment, and too much spirit to endure the thought of living all their lives upon alms; they laugh, and well they may, at the idea of saving banks, where they are to provide for sickness and old age by putting by a penny or two a week, while each labourer is paying about four shillings a week in taxes. In short, they now, in spite of all the endeavours to "irritate and mislead,” clearly see their way, and are coolly and firmly pressing forward with petitions for Reform.

And, why are you alarmed at this? Do you fear the consequences