a struggle
against privilege; an English revolution is a struggle for it. If a new
class rises in the State, it becomes uneasy to take its place in the
natural aristocracy of the land: a desperate faction or a wily leader
takes advantage of this desire, and a revolution is the consequence.
Thus the Whigs in the present day have risen to power on the shoulders
of the manufacturing interest. To secure themselves in their posts, the
Whigs have given the new interest an undue preponderance; but the new
interest, having obtained its object, is content. The manufacturer,
like every other Englishman, is as aristocratic as the landlord. The
manufacturer begins to lack in movement. Under Walpole the Whigs played
the same game with the commercial interests; a century has passed, and
the commercial interests are all as devoted to the constitution as the
manufacturers soon will be. Having no genuine party, the Whigs seek
for succour from the Irish papists; Lord John Russell, however, is only
imitating Pym under the same circumstances. In 1640, when the English
movement was satisfied, and the constitutional party, headed by such men
as Falkland and Hyde, were about to attain power, Pym and his friends,
in despair at their declining influence and the close divisions in their
once unanimous Parliament, fled to the Scotch Covenanters, and entered
into a 'close compact' for the destruction of the Church of England as
the price of their assistance. So events repeat themselves; but if the
study of history is really to profit us, the nation at the present day
will take care that the same results do not always occur from the same
events.

When passions have a little subsided, the industrious ten-pounder, who
has struggled into the privileged order of the Commons, proud of having
obtained the first step of aristocracy, will be the last man to
assist in destroying the other gradations of the scale which he or
his posterity may yet ascend; while the new member of a manufacturing
district has his eye already upon a neighbouring park, avails himself of
his political position to become a county magistrate, meditates upon a
baronetcy, and dreams of a coroneted descendant.

The nation that esteems wealth as the great object of existence will
submit to no laws that do not secure the enjoyment of wealth. Now, we
deprive wealth of its greatest source of enjoyment, as well as of its
best security, if we deprive it of power. The English nation, therefo