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Work, indeed! who, with the spirit of a man, would work for a country where there is neither liberty of speech nor of action? a land full of beggarly aristocracy, hungry borough-mongers, insolent parsons, and "their . . . wives and daughters," as William Cobbett says, in his "Register." 'Ah, the Church of England has been a source of incalculable mischief to these realms, said another.

He brought the king to abstain from opposition, and strove to buy off the borough-mongers, as the holders of rotten boroughs were called, by offering to compensate them for the seats they lost at their market-value. But the bulk of his own party joined the bulk of the Whigs in a steady resistance to the bill, while it received no effective support from the general opinion of the people without.

Work, indeed! who, with the spirit of a man, would work for a country where there is neither liberty of speech nor of action? a land full of beggarly aristocracy, hungry borough-mongers, insolent parsons, andtheir . . . wives and daughters,” as William Cobbett says in hisRegister.”’ ‘Ah, the Church of England has been a source of incalculable mischief to these realms,’ said another.

Just after the final failure, the completion of the last act of the French Revolution, when the legitimate wits were crying out, 'The farce is over, now let us go to supper, these provoking reasoners got up a lively hypothesis about introducing the domestic government of the Nayrs into this country as a feasible set-off against the success of the Borough-mongers.

Nevertheless, the efforts of the "borough-mongers" were all but successful, and after only two nights debate the bill passed its second reading by a bare majority of one, 302 voting for it, and 301 against it.

For this plain reason: because all those who belong to the public press, the liberal press, have been the agents or the, tools of one or the other of the two great political factions, nick-named Whigs and Tories; because throughout the whole of my political life, I have honestly opposed the peculations, the plunderings, and frauds of the borough-mongers of both those two factions upon the people, upon the earnings of the poor; because I have never in any way been, nor ever would be, linked on to either of those factions; because I have fairly, manfully, and openly stood up for the political rights of my poorer fellow countrymen, and never for one moment of my life have compromised those rights, in order to secure or promote my own interest.

Under Grattan's Parliament the country began to enjoy a degree of prosperity such as she had never known before, and the destruction of that Parliament was effected, as Castlereagh, the Chief Secretary, himself expressed it, by "buying up the fee-simple of Irish corruption"; in other words, by the creation of twenty-six peerages and the expenditure of one and a half million in bribing borough-mongers.

But what was most galling was the fact that the misery, the taxes, and the debt had been accumulated, not by the will of the people, but by a corrupt House of Commons, the property of borough-mongers, for the sake of supporting the Bourbons directly, but indirectly and chiefly the House of Hanover and the hated aristocracy. There was also a scandalous list of jobs and pensions.

The whig government, engaged in a life-and-death contest with the English borough-mongers, hesitated to crush the Irish insurgents by military force, or to initiate a sweeping reform of the Irish Church. Early in 1832, however, committees of both houses reported in favour of giving the clergy temporary relief out of public funds, and of ultimately commuting tithes into a charge upon the land.

His gratitude to Leonard became so lively that Dick offered to bring his nephew in for Lansmere instead of himself; and when Leonard declined the offer, exclaimed, "Well, then, any friend of yours; I'm all for reform against those high and mighty right honourable borough-mongers; and what with loans and mortgages on the small householders, and a long course of 'Free and Easies' with the independent freemen, I carry one seat certain, perhaps both seats of the town of Lansmere, in my breeches pocket."