lling with some portion of those august estates.
They despair of destroying the Parliament; by it, and by it alone, can
they succeed in their objects. Corruption for one part, force for
the other, then, is their motto. In 1640 they attempted to govern the
country by the House of Commons, because the aristocracy was then more
powerful in the House of Commons than in the House of Lords, where a
Peerage, exhausted by civil wars, had been too liberally recruited from
the courtiers of the Tudors and the Stuarts. At the next revolution
which the Whigs occasioned, they attempted to govern the country by
the House of Lords, in which they were predominant; and, in order to
guarantee their power for ever, they introduced a Bill to deprive the
King of his prerogative of making further Peers. The revolution of 1640
led to the abolition of the House of Lords because the Lords opposed the
oligarchy. Having a majority in the House of Lords, the Whigs introduced
the Peerage Bill, by which the House of Lords would have been rendered
independent of the sovereign; unpopular with the country, the Whigs
attacked the influence of popular election, and the moment that, by
the aid of the most infamous corruption, they had obtained a temporary
majority in the Lower House, they passed the Septennial Act.

The Whigs of the eighteenth century 'swamped' the House of Commons; the
Whigs of the nineteenth would 'swamp' the House of Lords. The Whigs
of the eighteenth century would have rendered the House of Lords
unchangeable; the Whigs of the nineteenth remodel the House of Commons.

I conclude here the first chapter of the 'Spirit of Whiggism'-a little
book which I hope may be easily read and easily remembered. The Whig
party have always adopted popular cries. In one age it is Liberty, in
another reform; at one period they sound the tocsin against popery, in
another they ally themselves with papists. They have many cries,
and various modes of conduct; but they have only one object--the
establishment of an oligarchy in this free and equal land. I do not
wish this country to be governed by a small knot of great families, and
therefore I oppose the Whigs.

CHAPTER II.

_Parliamentary Reform_

WHEN the Whigs and their public organs favour us with their mysterious
hints that the constitution has provided the sovereign with a means to
re-establish at all times a legislative sympathy between the two Houses
of Parliament, it may be as well to