A RECKONING WITH THE TORIES.

Pants, 3d December, 1834.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.

THE injunctions to timely resistance delivered, as if in the spirit of prophecy, by EDMUND BURKE, sixty-four years ago, and communicated in my letter of last week, have, it appears, found in your eyes the favour of insertion. The success of his first communication has tempted your correspondent to intrude on your columns another oracular admonition of the same soothsayer, not less significant, nor less promotive of useful reflection in the parties to whom it is ad- dressed. Exhcrtations to virtuous energy contribute to keep alive the zeal, not easy to preserve in a glow, of the patriotic. Denunciations of probable consequences are no less beneficial in speaking to the con- science and the terrors of the misguided and the unprincipled. The latter, indeed, is an undertaking much easier than the first : to pacify apprehensions is as difficult as to kindle righteous indignation : fear never slumbereth nor sleeps : passion and interest are too strong for reason in the Tories, but terror predominates in them over passion and interest ; like the devils, they believe and tremble. Let the up- holders of abuses— denounced long ago to public indignation, and to- wards which the people have already stretched out the arm of ester- nunation—reflect on the following admonition of a not unfriendly voice, —for BURKE was no unsparing Reformer, but content to correct what it was impossible to defend and dangerous to keep,—and read therein the fate of privileged classes that blindly and obstinately oppose their private interests or prejudices to the progressive amelioration of a whole people's condition.

EDMUND BURKE'S WARNING TO GOVERNMENTS AND CHURCHES THAT REFUSE TO BE REFORMED, WHEN THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE CALLS OUT FOR CORRECTION.

" EARLY REFORMATIONS are AMICABLE ARRANGEMENTS with a FRIEND in power, LATE reformations ate terms IM- POSED UPON A CONQUERED ENEMY; EARLY reformations are made in COOL BLOOD, LATE reformations are made under a state of INFLAMMATION. In that state of things, the people behold in government NOTHING that is RESPECTABLE. They ee the ABUSE, and they will see NOTHING ELSE. They fail into the temper of a furious populace, provoked at the disorder of a HOUSE OF ILL-FAME : they never attempt to correct or regulate ; they go to work by the stroarisr WAY — THEY ABATE THE *NUISANCE, THEY PULL DOWN THE HOUSE."

The above " awful warning," to which tremendous facts have, in another country, given a complete justification, might seem to have been delivered in the spirit of a sagacity that already presaged the down- fal of the French Monarchy and the extirpation of the Gullican Church and the French Aristocracy. But the discourse in which it is found was spoken more than ten years previously to that instructive catastrophe ; and so far was the orator from adequately appreciating the state of the public mind abroad, and the immense influence exer- cised there by the American emancipation recently consummated, that he absolutely singles out France as an example for Great Britain to

follow in the ways of a patient, providential, and TIMELY Reform. In fact, the conciliating, economical Administration of TURGOT and of NECKAR—interposed, like a Whig Ministry, between abuses and revo- lution, to correct, however gradually, the one, and to stave off the imminency of the other—had given men, who saw not how wide and deep was the gangrene, and reflected not on the incorrigible nature of privileged orders, reason to hope, that notwithstanding conservative ob- stinacy on the one hand, and revolutionary impatience on the other— the Scylla and Charybdis of mitigated monarchy—the body politic would come forth of the ordeal " as crouse as a eat when the fleas are caimbed at!" Alas ! the Conservative fleas clove to the carcase, till it stank with the corruption they had engendered, and the pair body died. Not to have foreseen this result, is no disparagement to BURKE'S poli- tical prescience: when the French people are en train, the march of a century is traversed in a week ; and even in our more regularly-moving machine, whose comparatively tortoise-like pace gives men time to con- sider their whereabout, it is apprehended that few of those who mur- mured at the denii-mirsures of the Whigs, in the first session of the Re- formed Parliament, foresaw how soon things were to be precipitated onward in the path of reformation—if it stop at reformation—by the Conservative resistance of the Tories : so true it is that the follies of men often effect more for them than their wisdom. It was from our own history, which has its great lessons too, that BURKE drew his pre- sentiments of danger; and he read a warning to the Hanoverian family, raised by the Nation to the British Throne, from the fate of the native princes, whose place, which knew them no longer, that foreign house had been brought over to fill. When the words of departed statesmen are found in exact coincidence with the emergencies of a subsequent period, they come with a force superior to that of contemporary de- nunciations; for as they cannot be suspected of having been accom- modated to events yet in the womb of time, the strictness of their ap- plication to them demonstrates their conformity to the principles of everlasting truth. Your correspondent, therefore, is not apprehensive you will accuse him of drawing too largely on your columns, where space is at this moment particularly valuable, if he subjoins, for the benefit of the CONSERVATORS OF ABUSES, the following prudential hints of a statesman, whom those sticklers for whatever is profitable to their own younger branches in Church and State are wont to cry up as the apostle of their cause : if they have ever studied him to the detri- ment of others, let them for once read him to the possible conservation of themselves.

" If there is any one eminent criterion, which above all the rest distinguishes a WISE government from an administration WEAK and istraoviDENT, it is this —well to know the best time and manner of YIELDING what it is IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP. There have been, Sir, and there are many who choose to CHICANE WITH THEIR SITUATION, rather than be instructed by it. Those gentlemen argue against every desire of reformation upon the principles of a criminal pro- secution. It is enough fur them to justify their adherence to a pernicious sys- tem, that it is not of their contrivance; that it is an INHERITANCE OF AB- SURDITY, derived to them from their ancestors; that they can make out a long and unbroken PEDIGREE OF MISMANAGERS that have gone before them. They are proud of the antiquity of their house, and they defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance; [which indeed they usually are) afraid of de- rogating from their nubility; and carefully avoiding a sort of blot in their scutcheon, which they think would degrade them for ever. " It was thus that the unfortunate CHARLES the First defended himself on - the practice of the STUART who went before him, and of all the TUDORS; his partisans might have gone to the PLANTAGANETS. They might have found Ban EXAMPLES enough both at home and abroad, that could have shown an ancient and illustrious descent. But there is a TIME when men WILL NOT SUFFER BAD THINGS, because their ancestors HAVE SUFFERED WORSE. There is a TIME when the HOARY HEAD OF INVETERATE ABUSE will neither draw REVERENCE nor PROTECTION."

According to EDMUND BURKE, a known, exposed, notorious abuse, however hoary, however venerable, cnnivoT be perpetuated in opposition to the will of an enlightened community ; and must, if sought to be upheld in defiance of that will, bring destruction on the classes and individuals who have, or conceive they have an interest in its main- tenance. The voice of history confirms the warning of the statesman; and to the example of CHARLES THE FIRST, here cited by BURKE, as irrefragable confirmation of his argument, may now be added that of Louts THE SIXTEENTII,—a man whose well-meaning weakness saved not his head, and whom the French Conservatives in Church and State, by their inflexible resistance to the Reforming Administrations of TURGOT and of NECKAR, and by their steadfast determination not to "yield what it was impossible to keep," did more to bring to the block than the very Convention which tried and condemned him. Let the Tories, or Conservatives, or whatever else they had "rather hear," run their eye down the following black list, and demand of their consciences, Waethei fly tire IBLB ABUSES ?-0I. Weir eyes and care, whether they are k now (a, declared, and notorious abuses ?—of their experience, whether this people of Great Britain and Irehind, being enlightened enough te, see, is. not resolute enough to eradicate, without compunction and W;.th- out reverence, those abuses ?—of their courage, whether they are pre- rated to struggle with the people by whom kings have fallen and primes been driven into exile, in defenee of those abuses ?—of their hearts (for, though Tories, they are yet men and Englishmen) whether %bey will answer for the blood this quarrel will, if not sopited by an entire extirpation of those abuses, one day draw out in a deluge ?—(and be this said without any pretensions to prophecy)—finally, of their fears, whether in the process of ridding out the house—staved off, by THEIR resistance, to the moment of extreme exasperation—it may not tumble about their ears, and the NUISANCE be abated only by the DOWNFAL of the building?

An Anglican Church in Catholic Ireland ; a splendid establish- ment amidst a famished people ; a hierarchy of Protestant bishops, .deaus, and clergy, faring severally like Dives every day, at the expense of u population, hiding, not dwelling, in hovels, starving on potatoes,

and belonging to a different and an irreconcilable faith. The abuse is " hoary-headed and inveterate "—of "ancient and illustrious descent" —an " inheritance of absurdity " transmitted through a long " pedi- gree of mismatiagers ;" but Buare tells you there is a TIME when men will not stiffer a BAD THING when it will " draw neither reverence nor protection." Look tOthe SIGNS, and ask yourselves whether this be not the time?]

IL A Starving Peasantry, crouching under the jaws of famine, with- out any legal provision to preserve to them the very first right of a man ; the right to -his own existence ; placed in hideous contrast with a small minority of opulent landlords, of whom the greater part—inveterate absentees—are revelling in the luxuries of the richest capitals in Europe. [When was a gallant people ever known to lie down meekly and die in a ditch ?) Ill. An Established Church in England, already dwindled into a minority, but still claiming exclusive privileges, only less abusive than her Hibernian sister, because not contrasted with a starvation so wide and so glaring ; odious from the injurious mode in which her imposi- tions are levied; contaminated with the most disgusting pluralities ; corrupt from the excessive inequality in which she distributes her revenues,—exalting a pampered few into the fortune of princes, and doling out a miserable pittance to many meritorious and hard-working sons ; and growing every day more offensive in the eyes of the nation, from the ungodly intermealing of her priests in political affairs, and the unblushing effrontery with which they confound their mercenary interests with those of religion. [Read the history of the Gallican Church in its former day ; its pretensions, its pride, its splendour, its tithes, its political intrigues, its back-stairs whispers in the ear of royalty—" squat like a toad "—its semi-philosophical, semi.infidel, and whole profligate abbtls ; and look at the Galilean Church now, humble, retiring, meek, simple, and threadbare, yet more respectable and re- epected in its abasement than in the full-blown pride ot its silk and lawn and purple grandeur : there, as in a glass, read the fortunes of your own unreformed hierarchy, 0 Tories !] IV. A population of Christian Sects, outnumbering that of the Established Church, taxed for the support of that Church and its ministers, whose exclusive pretensions and pride are as salt rubbed into

the wounds of the patient, combining contumeliam cum ; whose religious principles they dislike ; whose political interference in the State they detest ; whose ministers they have little reason to respect, and every day have less ; excluded from the very seats of education and their privileges, although those establishments were originally the pro- perty neither of the:Anglican nor of the Dissenter, but of the Catholic, and monopolized by the first at one of the unhappiest periods of our history—the High Tory days of the restored STUARTS. [The thing that has been is the thing that will be ; these are descendants of the men, before whose unyielding longanimity your predecessors, 0 Tories ! — the High - Monarchy, High-Church, High-Authority men, and Cavaliers of the STUART family—were as chaff before the wind. Is your stomach edged to an encounter with these men, for strive with them you must ; all that has yet passed has been but the preparatory gestures and formalities of the combat—the grapple is to come.] V. A system—say rather a labyrinth—of Law and legal procedure—

long, vexatious, intricate, and ruinous to a proverb ; placing Justice— the sole end of that costly State Establishment which sits like an in- cubus on -the industry of the Nation—beyond the reach of all who are not rich enough to pay handsomely for it ; and thereby serving the pur- poses of craft and oppression far better than judicial corruption and individual bribery. [Your Lordships, Spiritual and Temporal, in your wisdom saw ft to reject the Local Courts Bill, by which it was pro- posed to bring justice home to every man, rich or poor; and you were pleased to urge, in vindication of your proceeding, that Englishmen were not naturally litigious, and that to reduce legal expenses and put justice within their reach, was to corrupt the innocent plainness of their dispositions. Is this the time of day, think you, when such facetious reasoning will pass current under your right honourable stamp? Let a man but don a tinsel gown, and he shall, straightway forget his nature, and play antics " that make the angels weep." Yet this is the channel through which British legislation is yet doomed to flow !] VI. A nest of close Corporations and Companies, the tools of every trafficker in electoral suffrage, rich enough to buy them ; irresponsible squanderers of money levied on the citizens, or bequeathed, ages long agone, for the purposes of education and charity, and eaten unani- mously—unless an accidental conscience, smitten while the meat is yet hot in the mouth, breaks out into complaint—in honour of the testator. [Like that great posture-master, Louis he Grand, they ask, of what use is reading ? Is it not better far to paint our own noses with Bur- gundy, than to trim the lamp of the pale and sallow student?) Vu. A system of Bribery and Intimidation still practised in defiance of the law and the public morality, by the upholders of the good old machine that " worked" so well ; and that in the face of a people, struggling by the exercise of the elective franchise, thus abused under their eyes, to redress the grievances that vex their souls, try their pa- tience, and will one day break the elephant's back. VIII. A list of lord and lady Pensioners on the public purse, quer- :tiered on the People by successive Tory Administrations, and unable to allege a merit, 'Jr the 'shadow of one, why the bread should be taken fres, I the mouth of the hungry and the hungered, to add a dainty to the table of a right honourable mendicant. (" Private feeling might be over,

borne by legislative reason, and a man of a longsighted and strong. nerved humanity might bring himself, not so much to consider from whom he takes a seriateseutis ENJOYMENT, as for whom, in the end, he may preserve the ABSOLUTE NECESSARIES of life."-131.1tKE to a Tory House of Commons.] IX, A Military Establishment that costs more than the French army —four times more numerous, and five times more effective ; of which a tenth passes annually through the gaols ; where merit is deadened by not being allowed to rise, arid whose chiefs, with every means of punish. merit placed at their disposition, can maintain discipline only by tions abominable to humanity, destructive of soldierly honour, and die.' graceful to the nation. [Does this abuse stink in the nostrils of the British people, 0 Tories ? do men say they will undertake to supply S the place of the cat-o-nine-tails by giving free course to merit, as improving the morals of the soldiers ? do they give out that they will remove the " cold shade of the aristocracy," and give their gallant fel.. lows a (:ousaftY to fight fur?—Yes, and indeed they do whisper these , things tell it not at the Horse Guards.]

I X. A practice of Kidnapping, or forcible abduction—felony in private folks, but praiseworthy in governments, as though crime were . definable by the quality, not of the action, but of the party that con-raits it—tolerated in the Navy, and held to be the very life and soul of the' national bulwark ; when, even if reason were silent, the example ot America would show that honourable treatment and adequate advan.

tages are sufficient stimulants to a people eager for enterprise, and es. • peel/illy epanioured of maritime adventure. [Heaven foretell(' that a

• Tory Administration should ever endure long enough to combine once ' more Jacques Bonhomme and unwhipped Jonathan against his scourged and pickled cousin Bull!) XI. Cordiality abroad with every power that oppresses and brutalizes its subjects ; and hostility, secret or avowed, and only more deadly when

latent, to every people, who, having obtained some control, some in- fluence over the conduct of their own affairs, are struggling to improve their condition, and to fulfil the benevolent purpose of the Creator, a ho

has written everywhere, in large characters, PROGRESSIVE AMELIORATION as the law of the human race. [ Yea, verily, it is written even in Russia, though the despot's sword is assiduously at work to deface the print; but God is more powerful than his creature.]

XII. An overbearing weight of Taxation to support an enormous expenditure, which pays for places " that provide large rewards for Ho service," and for "expensive formalities that tend rather to the disgrace than the ornament of the State."—Butuse. [" The Ministers affect to doubt whether the people do really desire a plan of economy in the civil

government. Sir, this is too ridiculous It is impossible that a PRODIGALITY WHICH DRAWS ITS RESOURCES FROM TIIEIR IND!. GENCE, should be pleasing to them."—Beitee. A great part of this load the Tories have saddled FOR EVER on the people ! A great pan of the load, wholly contracted by them, is beyond the reach even of economy. Good God ! and these men think to bestride the State again ! And this party, that should be grateful for permission to live quietly in a nation they have beggared, aspire to rule it. What will come next ?] XIII. XIV. X V. &c. &c. And lastly, a house of Hereditary Legis- lation, stocked during half a century of Tory domination with every wealthy owner of the means of corruption, ready to abet violence, craft, and profusion, wherever and whenever—to resist reformation, whence- soever and in whatsoever, and entailed in himself, and his posterity, on the nation FOR EVER—the never-dying legislator of twenty. four millions of British men ! Oh, horror of horrors, most horrible !

Now, Tories—to close the reckoning—be these abuses ? Be they crying, atrocious, insufferable abuses ? Do they stir loathing and in- dignation in every man's breast, where heart is lodged and gall abideth ?

Will you undertake to uphold them ? But measure the burden well, try it heedfully on your shoulders, poise it carefully, and then turn and contemplate the aspect of the people. You see those swarthy myriads at Birmingham, at Manchester, at Glasgow, at Edinburgh, in every town where British industry and intelligence are most active. London is under your eyes : remote and dim in the background are the wild millions of Leinster and Munster. For what is this vast people up almost in arms ? Will they forget to-morrow why they assembled yesterday ? They are the long-remembering, long-suffering natives of the British Isles; whose fathers tired out the tyranny of the STUARTS, and struck down their oppressors in more than one listed field.

they disperse by edict, and go quietly home on proclamation ? They are the countrymen of those who knew not when they were beaten at Waterloo. Will they be gulled by a painted delusion, and put off with a mockery of Reform ? They are sagacious British artisans : they have noses for an abuse, and already they more than half know the process by which the poor man's fowl is boiled down into broth for the lord. Will you convict them of error by the sword, then? will you sabre these myriads ? will you dragoon these millions into passive obedience to Oligarchy ? Shall blood run like ditch-water, and the Three Nations be involved in one common suspension of liberty, that you may enjoy your abuses in peace, and they the blessing of a Tory A - ministration ? But you vow you will neither shed blood, nor constnict treasons, nor breed spies, nor imprison at pleasure, nor gag, nor persecute, nor transport, nor hang, nor cut down, nor do any one of the hundred tender things wherewithal you used to beguile your leisure, and flavour the insipidity of your existence. Ask your scribes, read in history : ask the Quarterly. Blackwood, and "the hive." They will tell you, that in the annals of mankind, a people so far gone in a social revolution never stopped voluntarily short in that career which - improved intelligence and awakened passion, does, by a law of nature, run as necessarily as water down a declivity. But thc Quarterly is pusillanimous and hypocrite, and will only involve you in a cloud of sophistry, or read you to sleep with two or three sheets of elegant verbiage. Blackwood—that chield is plain-spoken—will tell you frankly, there " will be a dust," and it must be " laid in blood : " with the grin of Mephistopheles, he will point back to your former doings this way, and remind you how "men, women, and children [I thank thee, Jew, for that word], having the excuse of later ignorance, were hunted by cavalry, cut down, or trampled under

their horses' hoofs by yeomanry, Ottaiwn be teowds into dungeons, afterwards pursued to ruin and be,gpsy, exiled. or even decimated by the executioner's," I The man drat wrote this, if yet in life, must long ago have wished he had chopped his fingers off ere they indited this piece of brutal and sanguinary exaltstion.] Such is your prospect ! The dtmon of Toryism holds up before your eyes the veil of futurity : a true philosopher, he reads the future in the past—the thing that was, is the thing that will be. Come on, then—yet reflect : our name is legion, for we be maay ; we are not the population of an isolated town, or city, or province. You lay the dust at Manchester. and you lay it in blood, but it is rising at Birmingham ; you point your grim battery over the Grassmarket, but the dust is conglomerated at Glasgow ; and who them shall control the wild millions of Munster when the great heart of Britain is swelling even unto bursting? Defenders of Church abuses, pluralists, sineenriszs, persioners, ab- sentees, bread-taxers, floggers, kidnappers, lords, every denomination

of Tories, behold your option ! Will you light with words? it is but breathing in the teeth of the North wind, when it topples down steeples and moss-grown towers. Draw, then, the sword, and charge in the name of Tithes and Church-rates ; " there ye ne'er shall charge again."

It may not be pleasing unto your ears, 0 Tories ! like the fastidi- ous writer in the Times newspaper, whom the mention of plebeian names fills with disgust. This appalling alternative in its sheer nakedness, may fill you also with disgust. But he that would smite with the sword must not quail at the sight of blood ; he that would handle the knife must not shrink at the stench of putrefaction. There is no use in biding from our consciences what the publind can read : it is a silly bird that thrusts its head in a sand-bank, and thinks nothing is, because it sees nothing. These abuses can only be either cut up by the roots, or maintained by the sword; and that must "TURN EVERY WAY to guard" them. Your mission is the latter, and that only ; for you dare not, Tories, you dare not, in the face of an attentive nation at home, and expecting nations abroad, swear that to be wurra to-day which yesterday you swore solemnly was SLACK.