itable principle,
either of property or population, must have been fatal to the Whigs;
they, therefore, very dexterously adopted a small minority of the
nation, consisting of the sectarians, and inaugurating them as the
people with a vast and bewildering train of hocus-pocus ceremonies,
invested the Dissenters with political power. By this _coup-d'etat_ they
managed the House of Commons, and having at length obtained a position,
they have from that moment laid siege to the House of Lords, with the
intention of reducing that great institution and making it surrender at
discretion. This is the exact state of English politics during the last
five years. The Whigs have been at war with the English constitution.
First of all they captured the King; then they vanquished the House of
Commons; now they have laid siege to the House of Lords. But here the
fallacy of their grand scheme of political mystification begins to
develop itself. Had, indeed, their new constituency, as they have long
impudently pretended, really been 'the people,' a struggle between
such a body and the House of Lords would have been brief but final.
The absurdity of supposing that a chamber of two or three hundred
individuals could set up their absolute will and pleasure against the
decrees of a legislative assembly chosen by the whole nation is so
glaring that the Whigs and their scribes might reasonably suspect that
in making such allegations they were assuredly proving too much. But
as 'the people' of the Whigs is in fact a number of Englishmen not
exceeding in amount the population of a third-rate city, the English
nation is not of opinion that this arrogant and vaunting moiety of a
class privileged for the common good, swollen though it may be by some
jobbing Scots and rebel Irish, shall pass off their petty and selfish
schemes of personal aggrandisement as the will of a great people, as
mindful of its duty to its posterity as it is grateful for the labours
of its ancestors. The English nation, therefore, rallies for rescue
from the degrading plots of a profligate oligarchy, a barbarising
sectarianism, and a boroughmongering Papacy round their hereditary
leaders--the Peers. The House of Lords, therefore, at this moment
represents everything in the realm except the Whig oligarchs, their
tools--the Dissenters, and their masters--the Irish priests. In the
meantime the Whigs bawl aloud that there is a 'collision'! It is true
there is a collision; but it is