wn great
property, but on a system fertile of political evils, fertile also of
low iniquities of which ordinary justice take cognisance. Bind up, in
inseparable union, the privileges of your estate with the grievances
of ours: resolve to stand or fall with abuses visibly marked out for
destruction: tell the people that they are attacking you in attacking
the three holes in the wall, and that they shall never get rid of
the three holes in the wall, till they have got rid of you; that a
hereditary peerage and a representative assembly, can co-exist only in
name, and that, if they will have a real House of Peers, they must be
content with a mock House of Commons." This, I say, is the advice given
to the Lords by those who call themselves the friends of aristocracy.
That advice so pernicious will not be followed, I am well assured; yet
I cannot but listen to it with uneasiness. I cannot but wonder that it
should proceed from the lips of men who are constantly lecturing us on
the duty of consulting history and experience. Have they never heard
what effects counsels like their own, when too faithfully followed, have
produced? Have they never visited that neighbouring country, which still
presents to the eye, even of a passing stranger, the signs of a great
dissolution and renovation of society? Have they never walked by those
stately mansions, now sinking into decay, and portioned out into lodging
rooms, which line the silent streets of the Faubourg St Germain? Have
they never seen the ruins of those castles whose terraces and gardens
overhang the Loire? Have they never heard that from those magnificent
hotels, from those ancient castles, an aristocracy as splendid, as
brave, as proud, as accomplished, as ever Europe saw, was driven forth
to exile and beggary, to implore the charity of hostile Governments and
hostile creeds, to cut wood in the back settlements of America, or to
teach French in the schoolrooms of London? And why were those haughty
nobles destroyed with that utter destruction? Why were they scattered
over the face of the earth, their titles abolished, their escutcheons
defaced, their parks wasted, their palaces dismantled, their heritage
given to strangers? Because they had no sympathy with the people,
no discernment of the signs of their time; because, in the pride and
narrowness of their hearts, they called those whose warnings might
have saved them theorists and speculators; because they refused all
concessio