s a few months,
will ripen the bitter fruit, which the meekness of undecided governments
has suffered to grow before their eyes. The Ballot, which offers a
subterfuge for every fraud; Extended Suffrage, which offers a force for
every aggression; the overthrow of all religious endowments, which
offers a bribe to every desire of avarice--above all that turning of
religion into a political tool, that indifference to the true, and that
welcoming of the false, in whatever shape it may approach, however
fierce and foul; however coldly contemptuous, or furiously fanatical,
however grim or grotesque, whose first act must be to trample all
principle under foot, and place on its altar the worship of the
passions;--those are the demands which are already made, and those will
be the trophies which the hands of political zealotry and personal
rapine, in the first hour of their triumph, will raise on the grave
where lies buried the Constitution.

Yet nothing is done by the natural defenders of the rights of
Englishmen. No leader comes forward; no new followers are to be found;
no banner is raised as the rallying point for the fugitives, already
broken. We see the approach of the evil, as the men of the old world
might have seen the approach of the Deluge; awaiting with folded hands,
and feet rooted to the ground, the surges which nothing could resist;
looking with an indolent despair at the mighty inundation, before which
the plain and the mountain alike began to disappear; and sullenly
submitting to an extinction, of which they had been long offered the
means of escape, and perishing, with the pledge of security floating
before their eyes.

We are by no means desirous of being prophets of public misfortune; but,
with the tenets publicly avowed, in the elections which have just
closed, with the strong popularity attached to the most daring opinions,
with thirty pledged _Repealers_ from Ireland, with the wildest doctrines
of trade advocated by the popular representatives in England, with sixty
subjects of the Pope sitting in a Protestant legislature, and with the
evident determination to bring into that legislature individuals (and
who shall limit their numbers, when its doors are once thrown open to
their wealth?) who pronounce Christianity itself to be an imposture,--we
can conjecture no consequences, however hazardous, which ought not to
present themselves to the soberest friend of his country. That the worst
consequences may not