are particularly condemned by all the physicians who have watched the pestilence among them. The greatest care should be taken to avoid cold or wet feet-for diarrhoea is the worst of the predisponents. As we are ignorant whether the pestilential matter enters the healthy body through the pores of the skin, the lungs, or the alimentary canal, prudence requires that we should act as if it may enter by all of them. In many parts of Europe the attendants on cholera patients, and those who come into contact with the dead, use garments pitched over, or made of oilskin; and in former times, when the plague was here, physicians were obliged to wear such dresses, both because their own lives were considered as of the highest value, and that they might be at once distinguished in the streets. A false shame, or falser courage, might prevent many from spontaneously adopting such precautions, who would be happy to obey an official regulation enforcing them. The physician should carry a phial of chloride with him wherever he goes. His hands, after touching a patient, should be carefully washed with soap and water, and then sponged with the solution of chloride. The attendants on the plague wear a double handkerchief, steeped in vinegar, over the lower part of the face. The following pastile has been recommended: Dried chloride of lime, 12 grains, Gum tragacanth 1 ounce, 20 grains. This, being flavoured with some essential oil, should be made into lozenges of 18 or 20 grains, and one of them held in the mouth during the visit. In conclusion, we must entreat the public not to be swayed by the nonsense daily poured out in the newspapers, by persons the least entitled to be heard on this subject. Your merchant, whose traffic is likely to be interrupted, converts himself for the nonce into Medicus, Senex, Detector, &c. &c., and hazards assertions of the most unblushing audacity. In spite of the fearful ravages of this pest in all the islands of the Indian Ocean, we are told that England is safe-for cholera never crosses seas. Another assures us, that, at all events, a sea-voyage must prodigiously diminish its virulence ;—and yet it was after a voyage of three thousand miles-something more than the passage from Hamburg!that it carried off, by thousands, the inhabitants of Mauritius. A third is ready with his assertion, that no medical man or attendant on the sick has died of the disorder; and this, in the face of the Madras Report, which records the death of thirteen medical men in that presidency, and the illness of twenty more-of the St. Petersburg Reports, which show that every tenth medical man man in that capital was attacked, and that a very large proportion died; although we know, that of the small number of medical men at Cronstadt, four died; that in Astracan all the nurses and almost all the doctors were attacked; and that in Vienna, out of the first one hundred deaths in the whole of that great capital, three were medical men. Much is said, or whispered, as to the impolicy of exciting fear. We suspect that the influence of this passion in predisposing the body to contagion, has been exaggerated; but if that were otherwise, which would be likely to produce the more injurious effects,-the fear that may be excited now, or that which must be excited in case of the sudden apparition of this pestilence in the very bosom of our families? The system of discountenancing fear has been tried abundantly. Before the plague appeared at Marseilles, a wise man gave two pieces of advice to the magistracy of that town. Consider every sudden death as suspicious-Despise the squabbles of physicians.' The magistrates despised his advice, and fifty thousand of the inhabitants perished before the doctors admitted that the disease was contagious. At Messina the same course was followed. No precaution was adopted. All at once the pest was found raging, and the populace rose in the frenzy of wrath and despair, and glutted themselves with murder. As to individuals, in our humble opinion, the manly discipline of mind for impending danger, is to contemplate its coming, calculate its effects, and prepare; and we warn our rulers that if they neglect those preparations which they alone can make, the responsibility they incur is solemn. The question of contagiousness or non-contagiousness, having in prudence established the quarantine, they may safely leave to the physicians: the fact of the mortality of cholera, when it once reaches any country, is that which ought now to occupy their minds and direct their measures. This pest destroys here a sixth, there a fourth, and in a third town a half of the population. When such things are going on in a great town, what business is it that must not stop? What art can hinder thousands from being plunged into absolute want? or who will pause to ask whether the poison hovers in the air, or is transmitted from person to person? The instinct is to avoid the place —and it is all but uncontrollable. Nothing will induce any man to remain, who has it in his power to remove, except the knowledge that the government has done its duty-that all precautions have been adopted, and all pre-arrangements made. The more rigorous the laws, and the more strictly they are enforced, the more certainly will the government be pronounced a merciful one, at the time by the intelligent, in the sequel by all. VOI. XLVI. NO. XCI. T ART. ART. IX.-Letter to the Lords. By a Member of the House of Commons. Sept. 22, 1831. London. 8vo. THE HE House of Lords has, as we anticipated, done its duty. It has vindicated its own constitutional rights, and has, for a season at least, arrested the progress of revolution. It always seemed to us one of the strangest, and indeed one of the most alarming signs of the times, of the unconstitutional spirit and illegal designs which are afloat, that any doubt should have been entertained as to what the Lords would do; yet certainly, up even to the last moment, ministers affected to believe, and very solemnly asserted, that the result would be different. We at first attributed such absurd rumours to mere ignorance, but we now believe them to have been the offspring of an artful design to inflame the public mind, and aggravate, by such fallacious expectations, the ultimate disappointment of the populace. We are the rather induced to notice this device, because we see that a similar delusion will be, or rather already is, attempted for a similar purpose. Every 'blind Tiresias' of the administration who, ten days ago, so confidently predicted that the Lords would pass the Bill, is, notwithstanding the affront which his sagacity has just received, equally loud and confident in now assuring us that, in about six weeks' time, or even less, their lordships will have passed another bill, quite as efficient as the former. We flatter ourselves that our prophecies would appear better entitled to confidence than those whose fallacies have been so lately exposed; but until we see this other-different but equally efficient-something, we put so little trust in either the integrity or the common sense of the Ministers, and can so little guess what they may choose to think or call 'equally efficient,' that we shall not waste our readers' time in casting the horoscope of the unborn bill. Suffice it for the present that the two first-born of the union between the monarch and the mob are no more, and that from such an unnatural conjunction there seems, every hour, less probability of any other progeny than mis-shapen embryos or short-lived monsters. If vexation and rage are proofs of sincerity, the ministerialists are certainly sincerely disappointed by the majority in the Lords: -they are surprised at its numbers,-they are mortified by its respectability, they are confounded by its talents, and they are dismayed at its spirit ;-but, instead of reading the lesson they have received according to the old constitutional rule and to their own recent pledges of standing or falling by the bill,' they have determined to stand by their own salaries; and every engine of popular excitement has been employed to procure the sanction of the people to this liberal adherence to office, -this patriotic pertinacity of place! The first point to be established for this purpose was to persuade the public that the the defeat of the bill was only a temporary check, and that the ministers, if they could be induced to remain in power, would make short work with the majority of the Lords, and take effective measures for securing the passage of the new bill through that house. And short work to be sure it will be, if the atrocious provocations of the ministerial press and the murderous menaces of the ministerial mobs are to be carried into effect. We shall very soon be relieved not only from the majority in the Peers, but from the entire House of Peers; and the engine with which Lord Grey and his noble colleagues only proposed to turn a few votes, is much more likely to abrogate the noble Earl's 'Order,' and restore him to the simpler title in which, if we mistake not, he gloried about forty years ago,-of Citizen Grey. The constitutional duties and utility of the House of Lords have been so admirably explained by Paley, and his views have been so well illustrated by the recent conduct of that House, that we cannot put either the theory or the practice of this part of the constitution into a stronger light than by quoting the exordium of his luminous disquisition.* The proper use and design of the House of Lords are the following: First, to enable the king, by his right of bestowing the peerage, to reward the servants of the public, in a manner most grateful to them, and at a small expense to the nation: secondly, to fortify the power and to secure the stability of regal government, by an order of men naturally allied to its interests: and, thirdly, to answer a purpose, which, though of superior importance to the other two, does not occur so readily to our observation; namely, to stem the progress of popular fury. Large bodies of men are subject to sudden phrensies. Opinions are sometimes circulated amongst a multitude without proof or examination, acquiring confidence and reputation merely by being repeated from one to another; and passions founded upon these opinions, diffusing themselves with a rapidity which can neither be accounted for nor resisted, may agitate a country with the most violent commotions. Now the only way to stop the fermentation is to divide the mass; that is, to erect different orders in the community, with separate prejudices and interests. And this may occasionally become the use of an hereditary nobility, invested with a share of legislation. Averse to those prejudices which actuate the minds of the vulgar; accustomed to condemn the clamour of the populace; disdaining to receive laws and opinions from their inferiors in rank; they will oppose resolutions which are founded in the folly and violence of the lower part of the community. Were the voice of the people always dictated by reflection; did every man, or even one man in a hundred think for himself, or actually consider the measure he was about to approve or censure; or even were the common people tolerably steadfast in the judgment which they formed, I should hold the inter* The whole chapter is a most masterly treatise on Parliamentary Reform, well worthy attention. ference T2 ference of a superior order not only superfluous but wrong: for when every thing is allowed to difference of rank and education, which the actual state of these advantages deserves, that, after all, is most likely to be right and expedient, which appears to be so to the separate judgment and decision of a great majority of the nation; at least, that, in general, is right for them, which is agreeable to their fixed opinions and desires. But when we observe what is urged as the public opinion, to be, in truth, the opinion only, or perhaps the feigned profession, of a few crafty leaders; that the numbers who join in the cry, serve only to swell and multiply the sound, without any accession of judgment, or exercise of understanding; and that oftentimes the wisest counsels have been thus overborne by tumult and uproar; we may conceive occasions to arise, in which the commonwealth may be saved by the reluctance of the nobility to adopt the caprices, or to yield to the vehemence, of the common people. In expecting this advantage from an order of nobles, we do not suppose the nobility to be more unprejudiced than others; we only suppose that their prejudices will be different from, and may occasionally counteract, those of others.'-Mor. and Pol. Philosophy, b. vi., c. 7. The whole of this passage is so wonderfully apposite to our present circumstances, that there is not one word of it which is not important and decisive. And in exposing, as we shall have but too many occasions to do, the attacks made on the House of Lords by the Ministers and their followers, we entreat our readers to bear in mind, and to apply to the cases as they arise, the doctrines of the constitution thus prepared, as it were, for our special use by the prophetic sagacity of Paley. The first object selected for the vituperation of the press and the fury of the mob has been the Bench of Bishops. The Bishop of Exeter directly charged Lord Grey with having given the signal for this attack by the manner in which he addressed the spiritual Lords in the debate. Lord Grey indignantly denied the charge, (saying, that, on the contrary, he had never spoken of the heads of the Church except with delicacy and respect,') but unluckily challenged the Bishop to prove his assertion. We extract the Bishop's reply, which appears to us, as it seems also to have done to Lord Grey, unanswerable. But 'The Bishop of Exeter said he had not alluded to the Noble Lord personally, nor had he accused his Majesty's Ministers of the intention to incite to outrage. That he solemnly declared. the Noble Lord called upon him for proofs of what he had advanced, and he was not unwilling to produce them. It would be recollected that the Noble Earl, on the first night of the debate, called upon the Bench of Bishops well to consider what would be their position in the country if the measure should be rejected by them, or by them with the aid of a small majority of lay Lords. He thus implied that they ought to be led by this consideration, and that if they did not vote for the Bill they would become the just |