is it not rather hard that my confidence in the right honourable
Baronet and the noble lord is to be imputed to me as a crime by the very
men who are trying to raise the right honourable Baronet and the noble
lord to power? The Charter, we have been told in this debate, is the
child of the Reform Bill. But whose child is the Reform Bill? If men are
to be deemed unfit for office because they roused the national spirit
to support that bill, because they went as far as the law permitted in
order to carry that bill, then I say that no men can be more unfit for
office than the right honourable Baronet and the noble lord. It may be
thought presumptuous in me to defend two persons who are so well able to
defend themselves, and the more so, as they have a powerful ally in
the right honourable Baronet the Member for Tamworth, who, having twice
offered them high places in the Government, must be supposed to be of
opinion that they are not disqualified for being ministers by having
been agitators. I will, however, venture to offer some arguments in
vindication of the conduct of my noble and right honourable friends,
as I once called them, and as, notwithstanding the asperity which
has characterised the present debate, I should still have pleasure in
calling them. I would say in their behalf that agitation ought not to be
indiscriminately condemned; that great abuses ought to be removed;
that in this country scarcely any great abuse was ever removed till the
public feeling had been roused against it; and that the public feeling
has seldom been roused against abuses without exertions to which the
name of agitation may be given. I altogether deny the assertion which
we have repeatedly heard in the course of this debate, that a government
which does not discountenance agitation cannot be trusted to suppress
rebellion. Agitation and rebellion, you say, are in kind the same thing:
they differ only in degree. Sir, they are the same thing in the sense
in which to breathe a vein and to cut a throat are the same thing. There
are many points of resemblance between the act of the surgeon and the
act of the assassin. In both there is the steel, the incision, the
smart, the bloodshed. But the acts differ as widely as possible both in
moral character and in physical effect. So with agitation and rebellion.
I do not believe that there has been any moment since the revolution
of 1688 at which an insurrection in this country would have been
justifia