o higher source than
their own political advantage, and no more lofty end than to divide and
distract a sister-nation. Of these we may instance the most conspicuous
of all, Lord Brougham,--who, after having for half a century derived all
the benefit he could from the striking and pathetic points in slavery to
vivify his eloquence, turns the bitter vial of his dotage against those
who stake everything upon its extinction. But everybody knows that Lord
Brougham is a type of those statesmen who stand by the people in the
Commons and grind the people in the Lords; who, after crying down public
wrongs, upon finding the responsibility of a coronet on their shoulders,
suddenly become arrant sticklers for hereditary rights. We are amused to
notice, among those peers who have risen above the selfishness by which
they are surrounded, and have given us a well-timed sympathy, but few
who are of new creations: for the Duke of Argyle and the Earls of
Carlisle and Clarendon are descendants of the oldest and proudest houses
in the realm.

It is gratifying to observe that those forces which are operating
against us are those which are rapidly losing that control in public
affairs which belonged to past phases of society; while those forces
which are proper to the present, and are inevitably to assume the
preponderance in the future, appear as they develop to be more and more
sympathetic with the cause of our national integrity. Aristocratic
prestige is shrinking back before an advancing enlightenment which
elevates all to equal dignity.

The present ministry is a fair type of the selfishness of British
statesmanship. The antecedents of its principal members are those of
timeserving politicians. Lord Palmerston, starting on his career as a
Tory of the Wellington stamp, has veered round as the tide has turned
against his former associates, and is the still distrusted
representative of the Liberal party. Lord Russell, in the youth of his
public service a Radical reformer, and the eager disciple of Sir Francis
Burdett when Sir Francis Burdett could not lead a corporal's guard, once
the prop and hope of those who sought a wider suffrage, has again and
again eaten his own words, and the history of his political life is a
ludicrous illustration of the perplexities of politicians. His
invariable course as a diplomatist has been to leave the way open to
prevarication, to keep his opinions in a cloud, and to confound sense
with ambiguity. It wo