who have presented these petitions have, however, spoken out, what every body knows to be the fact, except the poor Reformers themselves, who fancy that all but fools and interested persons must be as zealous for reform as themselves, that the great majority of the freeholders in their respective counties are opposed to any such reforms in Parliament as either Radicals or Whigs would propose; and this we believe to be more than ever the sober, settled sense of the country at large. The integrity of Parliament has, in the present session, been made indeed sufficiently manifest. The Opposition has influence over many members, and the Government has influence over others; but he is willingly blind, or factiously perverse, who does not know, that the great body of most independent gentlemen, whose interests are altogether connected with the agricultural prosperity of the country, have it in their power, at any time, to produce a majority on either side. On all questions of vital interest to the country, that most independent body, the mercantile members of the House, must be added to the country gentlemen, and, of course, no measure obviously opposed to the rights and interests of the country could pass the House. In the present instance, however, we speak only of the members in the landed interest; they have had, in the present session, the power of counter acting Ministers, and taking up, and forcing too, those sweeping measures of the reduction of taxation, and of attacking the interest of the public creditor, which have been proposed. Their immediate interest, would, doubtless, have been promoted, though not their ultimate interest; for the permanent interest of one class arises out of, and can only emanate from, the interest of all. But they have set a noble example of calmness and moderate proceeding, and they have preferred the measures proposed by Ministers, who have shewn themselves sincere in their professions of economy and retrenchment, to those schemes which have been dictated rather by rashness and passion, than by patriotism and wisdom. This conduct of the House of Commons ought to establish it in the respect of every true patriot; for there never was a period of our history in which that House more steadily represented the sense of the country, or in which the true and permanent interests of the state more powerfully influenced its measures. Every step of experience tends to prove, that from no legislature, differently constituted, could we expect so much wisdom or so much public virtue. We know all that can be spouted about boroughs and corrupt influence, and it is all the froth and foam which a heated faction sends up to the surface of every shallow prater at a tavern or forum. We expect no form of government to which excep tions may not be taken, and in which evil will not be necessary to balance and neutralize evil. Our patriots are not quite the immaculate creatures they pretend. Favour, power, interest, are mistresses to whose charms they are not quite insensible. As to many of them, they are obviously most unprincipled, or ridiculously weak-headed. We have nothing to hope from change in the constitution of the House of Commons, and every change proposed would only go to make it the sport of a mob, and the demagogues who would command it; the very thing those demagogues aim at, and which, for that reason, the country will never yield. If any thing could more strongly mark the folly, which is always connected with attempts to reform the House of Commons, it is this, that now a number of men, connected with the agricultural interest, cry out for reform, upon the ground that that interest would be benefitted by it. Fools! do they not see that the moment their petition is granted, the landed interest would be displaced in great numbers by members sent up by the commercial and manufacturing districts, in which the elective franchise would be greatly extended, and by a host of demagogues who, with a mob, can out-talk and outwit the half of them, because they could neither stoop to the arts of managing the populace, nor practise them with so much success. In vain, in such a state of things, would the landholder look for that consideration of his interest in Parliament to which he is entitled, and which he can now secure. We might, in proof of the opinion we have expressed above, as to the independence of the House of Com'mons, appeal to many instances; but the proceedings of the House, during the past week, afford as strong a cor- SIR ROBERT WILSON. THE case of Sir R. Wilson has been brought before the House, and a most pitiful one it turns out to be, and was, therefore, most properly scouted by an immense majority, notwithstanding all the efforts of party to give it consequence. We turn to this, because it is one of those instances of politi. cal and party quackery, by which attempts have been made to delude and to inflame the ignorant. The first complaint is, that he was dismissed without trial, and the prerogative of the Crown to dismiss the military was, therefore, quarreled with. As the law stands, this was, however, ridiculous. No prerogative has been more unquestioned, none more frequently exercised, and in none is the public more interested. For, if no officer could be dismissed, without a judgment of officers assembled in court-martial, a new power, A as it was properly argued, is created But one would have sup- It was properly put to the discarded General in the debate, why he had Aaa 2 found nothing unconstitutional in this practice until it was applied to himself. Perhaps a reason can be found in that monstrous egotism which has marked his public life. When he was dismissed, who, according to Mr. Lambton in one of his speeches, was, independent of Wellington and the British army, the deliverer of Spain; or, according to Mr. Bennet, who deals out both praise and censure by the hogshead; he of whom it was universally said on the Continent, "it was he who led us on, nation after nation, to victory," without, be it remembered, either planning a campaign or fighting a single army-when he was dismissed, some most weighty reasons must exist; and he, with an exuberance of modesty, hints, that it must have been from his formidable opposition to Ministers! This was well met and rebuked by Lord Palmerston. "He really thought the honourable gentleman estimated his powers of hostility to his Majesty's Government too high, when he conceived that they had drawn down upon him such an exhibition of resentment." The fact, (and it was an honourable fact for Ministers to be able not only to state, but to challenge the Opposition upon, that no instance had occurred in which they ever visited those officers with even a show of resentment who had systematically opposed them,) might have led the ex-General to have looked more narrowly for some other and more influential cause. Before we state the merits of the question, we must expose a trick which Sir Robert had practised upon himself, and which his partisans have attempted to practise upon others. He collects all the chitchat tales and idle rumours of the day, and dwells upon them, as though they were the real cause of his dismissal, and then complains, that, for want of trial, he was deprived of the means of clearing himself. We suspect that half these tales, of his being in a conspiracy to obstruct the progress of the Queen's funeral procession, and others of the same kind, were invented by the partisans of Sir Robert, to make out his case to be one of hardship, and thus to convert it into an inflammatory topic. Whatever was their origin, he dwells most pathetically upon them, though without the slightest evidence that they formed any part of the MR. HUMK. THIS gentlemen is certainly one of the most extraordinary men of the present age. After running a brilliant career in India, and acquiring an intimate acquaintance with the mode in which army contractors and the servants of the Company contrive to amass wealth, he has returned to England, to enlighten the political darkness of the people, and to be a check upon the prodigality of Parliament and Ministers. He is unrivalled for the correct and statesman-like views which he always takes of financial questions, and he has already been pointed out by his friends and admirers as the successor of the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, whenever a change of Administration shall take place. It is not surprising, therefore, that such a man should think highly of his own talents and services. I am," said he, in the debate on Lord Archibald Hamilton's motion on the Scotch burghs, with a naïvaté quite touching, "an example of what would happen from a reform in the state of these burghs!" The House laughed at this harmless ebullition of the honourable member's vanity; and he immediately added, that he knew it sounded ominous in the ears of Ministers!" This is indeed most egregious egotism; and, should he give us a few more specimens of his overweening vanity, we shall certainly deem him a formidable rival of that very modest gentleman, Mr. William Cobbett. But this display of egotism is not to be wondered at. The thanks of that sage body, the Common Council of London, and two or three addresses which he has received from the country, have affected his brain, and he dances about the floor of the House of Cominons like an inflated balloon. 66 We have hitherto been contemplating Mr. Joseph Hume in his exaltation, as the first financier of his age. But, alas! he has had a sudden fall from the very summit of fame. On Friday night he made a formidable attack upon the Navy Estimates, pointing out the immense savings that might be made here and the immense savings there-lopping off with his retrenching knife thousands from one item, and a million from another. But the whole strength of his attack was directed against the sum expended for building and repairing ships in the last five years. "No less than SEVENTEEN MILLIONS," he asserted, “had been laid out, since 1816, in building and repairing ships." The House showed a disposition to doubt the correctness of this assertion; but the financier reiterated it, declaring that, if they doubted its truth, he would read the particulars of every year." Again the House laughed, but their laugh, loud as it was, was not loud enough to awaken the declaimer to a sense of the gigantic blunder in his calculation, for he contended, to the very end of his speech, that "he was not wrong." Mr. Croker, the Secretaiy of the Admiralty, followed him in the debate, ran aboard the smuggling lugger, and, by a brisk fire of sarcasm, wit, and argument, demolished the laborious calculations of her commander. In one item alone, namely, the charge for ship-building, Mr. Croker detected and exposed an error of not less a sum than ELEVEN MILLIONS! Was not this a “big blunder" on the part of a man who sets himself up as an oracle on financial questions? We could really sympathize with him, if we thought that such an error arose from downright ignorance of the subject on which he was declaiming; but it strikes us as being somewhat curious, that all his blunders should be on one side. He never, so far as we have seen, makes any item less than it really is, but always greater. His optics, by some strange perversity always magnify, and never diminish the sums subjected to their inspection. How is this? Does it arise from ignorance, or from wilful design? We know not, but such egregious blunders-blunders which would disgrace a schoolboy of a week's standing in arithmetic, must expose the pretensions of this wouldbe Chancellor of the Exchequer to the ridicule of every man who to think for himself." But, perhaps, he is intoxicated with the applause which he has recently received; and this supposition may, in the minds of some charitable persons, account for the pitiable figure which he cut in the House on Friday night. ALDERMAN WAITHMAN. dares THE folly of some men is truly astonishing. Our readers have not forgotten the intemperate, not to say illegal, interference of Sheriff Waith man with the coroner's inquests on the bodies of the two unfortunate men who lost their lives on the day of the Queen's funeral, nor his subse quent conduct in the affray with the soldiers at Knightsbridge barracks. The first excited the disgust of every thinking man, and the latter exposed this officious and meddling Sheriff to the ridicule of the country. But neither the disgust nor the ridicule seem to have had any salutary effect upon him. He and his partisans have magnified what they are pleased to call the attack upon him into a great constitutional question, and have called upon the House of Commons to institute an inquiry into the affair. A motion to this effect has been made by Mr. "Absolute Wisdom," who declared, that the Corporation of London thought it their duty to demand that an assault committed by the military on a person who had been invested with the high honour of Sheriff by the Livery of London, in Common Hall, when in the exercise of his authority, should become a subject of inquiry in Parliament." Now it is quite evident, that Alderman Wood, although he demanded inquiry, had already made up his mind on the subject, for he afterwards declared, that "the evidence proved that both a causeless and violent assault had been made" upon the valorous Sheriff. This evidence, it appears, was taken by "a Committee of General Pur poses,' " for the particular purpose, no doubt, of making out a case against the military. But what is the character and complexion of this evidence? Sir W. Curtis, who seconded the motion for inquiry, for the purpose, as he said, of exposing the foolery of the great Common Council, declared, that the evidence was not only selected by the committee, but questions were put to draw such answers as the party putting them desired." And, as a specimen of the character of the evidence, the facetious Knight read the following morceau. To one of the witnesses the subsequent questions were put and answers returned: "You were at Knightsbridge at the time the affray happened with the soldiers and the populace?" "No, I was not there." Then what do you know about it?"-"I got a note to attend here. All that I know was, that I was in company with a friend of mine on the Monday or Tuesday evening, and he said that he had been into the shop of a person of the name of Crabbe, and heard a man named Properjohn, or his man, tell Mr. Crabbe, that he heard a corporal of the Life Guards say · D—n Alderman Waithman, we are prepared for him, and have got a ball ready for him!'" A fine specimen this, certainly, of the evidence on which the House was called upon to go into the proposed inquiry! But the capital charge against the military is contained in the following passage of Sheriff Waithman's letter to Lord Bathurst. "Several of the soldiers," he says, "rushed at me with their swords drawn, and one actually loaded his carbine and directed it towards me, but was, as I have been informed, knocked down by one of the consta bles." Now let us hear the testimony of his own officer with respect to this important fact, which we quote from Mr. Peel's able analysis of the evidence. After saying that he saw a man levelling a carbine, he goes on thus:-" I had a staff in one hand and a stick in the other; I ran up to him right at the muzzle of the piece; I struck him, and hit him over the hand, and down the piece went, and I catched hold of it; I then laid hold of him, and said You villain, has not there been already blood shed sufficient, without your spilling more?" "What was your idea of his pointing, was it that he was singling out the Sheriff?"-"I cannot say that; I was so irritated with seeing him with the piece, and the people squealing at the opposite side; but he had it in different directions." Was it in that position that it appeared to be presented at Sheriff Waithman ?"—" If I were upon my oath I could not state that." Upon this important point, then, the Sheriff was informed wrong, and his valuable life was in no danger from the loaded carbine of the soldier, which appears to have been held up for the purpose of intimidating the dastardly mob by whom the military were assailed. But if the soldiery were so numerous as we were led to believe; if, as he was informed, they rushed at the gallant Sheriff with their drawn swords, is it not somewhat singular, that a single constable should be able not only to strike the carbine out of his hand, but actually to seize the soldier, and |