ART. IX.-1. Ireland: Its Evils and their Remedies, &c. &c. By MICHAEL THOMAS SADLER. 8vo. 1829.

2. The Christian Duty of granting the Claims of the Roman Catholics. With a Postscript, in Answer to the Letters of the Rev. G. S. Faber. By THOMAS ARNOLD, D.D. Head Master of Rugby School, and late Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. 1829. 3. Protestantism the Pole Star of England; a Brief but Comprehensive View of the Political History of England since the Reformation; wherein the Prosperity of the Country is shown to have been identified with the Support of the Protestant Religion. Copied chiefly from the Preface to a Work on the Prophecies, lately published by the Rev. George Croly. Beverly, 1829.

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THE tumultuous joy with which the sudden announcement of peace to Ireland was welcomed by the friends of civil and religious freedom, has gradually subsided to deep and solemn thankfulness for the purest political pleasure that this generation can live to witness. That nodding and impending danger, which, like the mysterious helmet in the Castle of Otranto, was enlarging every hour before our eyes, is at length swallowed up. The thunder-cloud, whose pressure took away our breath, is gone. The earth seems once more firm under our feet; and that future, which we durst not look upon, is rising bright and glorious-and on its forehead is the morning star! The whole aspect and character of the remainder of one's life are changed by it. Instead of feeling that our home and country were becoming a precarious leasehold, whose term we ourselves even might have the wretchedness of surviving, we shall now bow our heads to the nunc di. mittis, come when it may, in confidence that we are leaving to our children the imperial inheritance of a united kingdom, secured, as far as human probabilities may approach security, by all the elements of an enduring greatness.

This question has stood of late years like a Michael Angelo in a gallery, blinding us to every thing else. Now that it is at last disposed of, we shall be enabled to return to other human objects, and to look at them in other than merely Protestant or Papist bearings. The present measure is wisely and simply framed. The best way to disarm your enemy, is to disarm his mind. You want no security against him when, by doing him justice, you have made him your devoted friend. A hundred little technical contrivances, however apparently ingenious and successful, would have reduced the real security in an infinitely greater proportion, by manifesting the jealousy

of distrust, and keeping up so many occasions of possible division. They might have entangled posterity; and, at present, would only have afforded the great Master of Delay, who is as powerless in discussing principles, as he is unrivalled in the harassing warfare of detail, a splendid opportunity of crowning a consistent life, by seeking to intercept this national blessing by endless permutations and combinations of obstinate chicane.

The two Wings, whose dovelike office it is to waft home this messenger of peace, are as favourable conditions as could be well proposed (if conditions we must have) for terms of reciprocal concession. The Catholic Association had accomplished the object of its existence. From the instant that its power and spirit had passed into the constitution, nothing but a sort of corpse was left, for either their own vote or that of Parliament to consign to an honourable grave. Our patrician policy had made its two great leaders the real Tribunes of the Irish people for the time: and their faults have been the faults of that anomalous and stormy office. Ireland has not so many periods of brightness in her story, or so many candidates for her gratitude, that their names can ever be forgotten, in a country whose first patriot was Grattan, and where, it may now be hoped, that Lord Anglesey will be her last martyr. For the Association itself, it will need no other epitaph than the "Circumspice" of a nation it has freed. The other part of the compromise, the Disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders, is in appearance more ungracious; since, however substantially valuable, it has, just at the present moment, too much the air of a punishment for their Roman virtue. But when once the feeling (for it is matter of feeling only) is got over, and the first disappointment is softened by kind and judicious explanation, the alteration will be found, in itself, a solid and lasting good. The virtue the peasantry have lately displayed is the heroic excitement of a crisis, when the heart swells over its banks, and sweeps away all ordinary considerations before it. But as soon as things had returned to their natural channel, the peasant would have found himself the serf of heretofore, without adequate means or motive of resistance; and must have again been crushed between the old alternative, of ruinous collision, or perjured and degrading bondage. To relieve him from such a peril, is to prepare the way towards enfranchising him with a truer freehold-Freedom of mind and character, that by which man is emphatically Man. The statistics of Ireland, which must lay the next stone in the foundation of moral improvement, will gain greatly by the removal of an electioneering ambition, which few landlords have had the forbearance to withstand. Independent votes are what we want. A wise

legislature ought to stop wherever it can fix this standard, nor descend a shilling lower. Every age must take care of itself; and we must give those that come after us credit for re-opening the poll-book, and letting in a new class of freeholders, as soon as one is formed which can exercise the right usefully to itself and to the public. The late system had, in common times, all the mischief of universal suffrage, and all the baseness of a rotten borough. As many, however, as thought this disfranchisement unjust and injurious if taken by itself, but yet believed it indispensable to the success of the great measure with which it was combined, were equally bound to support it on the plainest principles of moral prudence. To taunt such compromises with the name of trimming, and to cant, with half a line out of a copy-book about not doing evil that good may come,' is to forget what all are doing every day they live. If a man is to fold his arms till a proposition of unmixed good is presented for his acceptance, he may take his stand with the farmer's boy, who waited till the river should run out. All restraint is, for instance, evil: But the lawgiver and the judge pass their lives in violating this goodly maxim. We presume there is no moral sense, or rule of Scripture, by which we can guide ourselves in respect either of the odd shilling more or less in the elective franchise, or concerning what is a proper, and what an improper, modification of the national adjustment of 1688. Individual rights can seldom clash so much with the general interest, as to counterbalance the great principle that demands the inviolability of property: and it is still more seldom that society has not the means of making individual compensation. But it is otherwise in the case of great portions of a community: For their only compensation must arise from the increased prosperity of the whole. These rights, too, being political, are impressed with a stronger trust, and are held by the express tenure of public service. To hold them inviolable, would bar us from altering the quantity, as well as quality, of the new blood, whose infusion the constitution might require; and we could as little add as take away. A remonstrance against extending the elective franchise to copyholders, upon the ground that such an innovation was a disturbance of the vested right that the freeholder had in his monopoly, would be only this same moon in another quarter. It is clear that, when the general objects and the particular objects of an institution clash, the latter must give way.

Just in the degree that we trembled at the crisis, from which we are now escaping, may be estimated our sense of gratitude to him, who, having lurched all swords of the garland,' has achieved this great civic victory of Justice, Mercy, and Peace. Whilst

the clergy seem groping about us in the dark in all directions, we feel pretty much as we suppose Ulysses did, when he was eluding the clutches of the bewildered Polypheme, (who at best had but one eye, and that now extinguished,) under the guidance of the Leader of the flock. The Duke has broken in upon their magic forest-the Mona defended with such Druidical fury; and notwithstanding the mist and the mutterings, the unholy words and spectral forms, arrayed against his entrance, he has pressed resolutely on to free this spell-bound subject, and break the enchanter's wand. Colonel Napier learned in Spain how the Tenth Legion came to worship Cæsar; and a greater than Cæsar is here-one who has not destroyed in peace the country he had saved by his sword. Untrammelled and uncommitted, not more protected by his splendid expatriations, than averse by nature from the paltering which had gangrened this vital question through its whole domestic bearings, he has amply repaid the universal respect, with which all eyes so anxiously watched him whilst yet wrapped in his impenetrable cloak. Although he came new to a question encompassed by contention and complicated by finesse, he saw that his choice upon it was indeed the choice in what class of statesmen he should hereafter stand. Having carried off the plate in military glory, he has refused, in his new career, to put himself into cart-horse harness -to leave the company of the Turennes and Marlboroughs of the Cabinet, and herd in the rear-rank of our secondary civilians, among the Poloniuses and Osrics of the Court of Denmark.

The question certainly is not new to Mr Peel; his present merit respecting it stands therefore on entirely distinct grounds, and yet is great. The reputation that he acquired whilst serving under his former colours, and his actual declaration that he has left them with reluctance, have enabled him to confer at last an important benefit on his country, by assisting to heal the wounds he had so long kept open. A confession so announced, must satisfy all who can be satisfied, that it has become, in any view of it, the least of two evils. We gladly pay him high interest for the aid which he is now giving to overthrow an Opposition, which he himself had mainly raised, consolidated, and upheld. In such a case, when the last able layman who could be found to advocate the obsolete prejudices of a powerful party, is bowled out by the strong conviction of necessity, he must be prepared to undergo the obloquy of the mob of followers who had made him the representative of their opinions, and had put, as politicians, their whole moral and intellectual existence into his hands. But this privilege of scandal, within certain limits excusable enough, has been abused in a manner disgraceful to the Tory press, and to

the party whom he provided with sense and speeches much longer than they deserved. The imps whom he conjured up and fed as companions and attendants, whilst he continued the practice of the black art,' are now flying at him because he has burnt his pernicious books, and resolved to trust to the despised faculty of human reason. Like Actæon, his own Hounds are ready to devour him—and for the same offence-opening his eyes. Nothing can show more forcibly that Mr Peel's understanding has got at length into its right place, than the different figure he is making this Session and the last; when, though none of the Tory pecking at him had begun, and whilst the Whigs were extending to him a most generous forbearance, a feather seemed dropping off almost every night. Allowing for the disproportionate consequence he attaches to the turn of the scale in a Parliamentary division, over the weightier matters of the question, he has shown at the last equal judgment, ability, and temper. Not only has Mr Peel dealt usefully by the public, in undertaking the official superintendence of the present measures; amidst great personal difficulties, we feel convinced he has also chosen that which, being the most fair and manly, ought to be the least painful and least unsatisfactory for himself. The choice could be to him only one of evils. He was in the old British dilemma-the sea before him, the barbarians behind. Mr. Peel is well aware that it is not the year 1829 which he has to explain and justify. It is not when private opinions and public conduct are coincident, that a man has any thing to repent of, or the country any reason to complain. Could Mr Canning have answered to his wish, 'Were our honoured Banquo here!' that princely and forgiving eye would have beamed with even unusual brightness in welcoming the new convert to his cause. He might have shrunk at the recital of the inward change of 1825,-at the thought of the eventful interval, and the continued resistance; above all, he must have felt the difficulty of reconciling with these communications, so long and so mysteriously concealed, the disqualification publicly pronounced on him in 1827, by reason of opinions, which, it now appears, were held at that very time, by at least one of his protesting and seceding colleagues. But sincerity is valuable, however late. The man who never changes his mind, must be about as great a fool as the man who is always changing it; and if there be an occasion when such an intellectual process ought to meet with indulgence, it is when you perhaps save a kingdom by submitting to it. Sæpe ego audivi apud milites eum primum esse virum qui ipse consulat quid ' in rem sit: secundum eum, qui bene monenti obediat: qui nec ipse 'consulere, nec alteri parere sciat, eum extremi ingenii esse.'

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This latter class, that cannot lead and will not follow, disdain