appointed with the allies, and it was found that he was gone into a still more disgraceful one. Kosciusco, the brave Polish patriot, had roused his countrymen for a last effort against their oppressors, our own dear allies, and with our money Frederick had marched off, joined the Russians, and defeating Kosciusco, made the third, and final partition of Poland! In the meantime our army in the Netherlands, in consequence of this desertion of Prussia, suffered great slaughter and repulse. We had, indeed, not only paid our 2,200,000l. for the extinction of Poland, but for the slaughter of our own troops! Few, when they lament the fate of Poland, and denounce in terms of deepest contempt both Russia and Prussia, its violators, are aware that we were the unremonstrating allies of these caitiff powers, and that our money, the troops raised and paid by us, and which, without this money, could not have stirred a foot, went to do this disgraceful work, making England an active and efficient partisan in it, nay, the most efficient of all, for without our pay they could not have effected it. Having effected it, the king of Prussia, who, as we have said, was at the very moment we paid him this 2,200,000l. tampering with the enemy, immediately made peace with him! Such was the manner in which our reckless ministers, with their eyes open, were duped out of their money for purposes most disgraceful to our name; and such were the men whom they were morally trying from year to year to bribe to the deliverance of themselves.

Thus in every point of view criminal and odious was that war whose monstrous cost Fox well said we paid " for not having any real representation." There is yet one more argument that has been advanced in favour of it, on mercantile grounds. It has been said it was our duty and interest to put down the French, and defend our continental customers. But it is now too well known that trade is not conducted on principles of preference, far less of gratitude, but of interest; and that, so long as our goods are best and cheapest, they will continue to be bought spite of all impediments, but no longer. The commercial accounts of this period strikingly confirm this theory. At the commencement of 1792 our exports were 24,905,2001.; our imports 19,659,358., or the total produce of our foreign commerce, 44,564,5581.; and this steadily advanced till the peace of 1815, spite of all Napoleon's continental or anti-English system, when our exports alone were 58,624,5507.! our imports 32,987,3907.; the total of our foreign commerce 91,611,9267.; thus exhibiting an increase of more than cent. per cent.! Nay, so imperative are the necessities of man, that British goods excluded from the ports of Hamburgh, Antwerp, Rotterdam, &c., entered Europe

through Turkey and Russia, and, traversing the whole continent, were sold and worn in these very ports!

On the other hand, where is the gratitude of the nations, especially of Germany, for all our subsidies, and our gigantic efforts in their behalf? Is it shown in a preference for us and our trade? Does Germany remember these times, and these things? Does it say "Never let us forget what the English did for us during the war and our days of calamity: let us buy all we can from them: let us encourage their commerce, for we owe them a mighty obligation, and they have covered themselves with debt for our rescue; and their children for generations must groan under it ?"

We hear not a word of all this. We hear only of" the proud English,—the haughty nation of shopkeepers.' We are hated by the whole continent for our greatness, and hated the more that we never were conquered, but were the witnesses of their humiliating subjection. Nay, we are not only hated and envied, but the very nation for whom we did so much, and suffered so much, and must continue to suffer, is zealously carrying out and establishing the very continental and anti-English system of the man that we put down and destroyed for them at the cost of such legions of our men and so many hundred millions of our money. Under the eager guidance of Prussia it has established the Zollverein, or League of Customs, to shut us not only out of the midst of all Europe, but also of America. It has already won Belgium to its plans-has given it a 30 per cent. preference over our iron, and other manufactures. It will speedily draw in Holland, Hamburgh, the States of Denmark and Sweden, and finally France. At this moment it is in progress of treaties with Brazil and the United States, to shut us out there, and, in a word, in return for the war that we carried on of men and millions of money for them, is making upon us a war of tariffs, which threatens a far more practical annihilation of our commerce than ever entered into the fertile brain of Napoleon.

To comprehend then, finally, the cause, the progress, and the infamous nature of this war, for which the English people were called on to pay at the rate of one hundred millions a-year, and by a property-tax of 10 per cent., yielding ten millions of money, we must call to mind that it was a war for the support of regal and aristocratic despotism, carried on by a junto in our country of 156 borough proprietors, who had usurped the House of Commons, and sold it to the aristocracy. To see more perfectly how this monstrous fraud has taken such awful shape and vastness, we will review, as briefly as we can, the progress of political corruption during this singular period.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE PROGRESS OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION FROM THE REVOLUTION OF 1688.

"The House of Lords-that Hospital of Incurables."—

LORD CHESTerfield.

The House of Commons-a part of our fellow-subjects collected together by means which it is not necessary to describe."-SIR FRANCIS BURDETT-Parliamentary Speech of 1810.

WHEN we gaze in wonder on the on-rolling inundation of the expenses of this country during the last great war, at the annual charges of, now 30 millions, now 50, now 70, now 90 millions, ; at some 4,000,000l. or 5,000,000l. awarded to us for our expenses at the final treaty of Paris, being given to the king of Holland to repair his fortresses; at 5,000,000l. given to the allies to put them in motion against France, and 5,000,000l. more to forward the homeward march of their armies, though they received equal sums from the French; 14,000,0007. in one year given to our allies to get them to do their own work; at the debt grown from 244,000,000l. at the beginning of the war to 835,000,000l. at the end, we are yet not to suppose that the bulk of this sum was, after all, given away to those foreign kings and armies to induce them to fight for their own cause, or was expended on the requisite supplies of our own troops. No! The same reckless and boundless extravagance distinguished every department of our government. It was the great aristocratic vulture preying on the rich and ever-springing liver of the bound Prometheus of Britain. The busy and ingenious people were to pay for all, and every department of government was full of eager and everthirsty leeches battening on the general corruption. Neither was this corruption the growth of a day. Spite of the brilliant fame of "the glorious Revolution of 1688," this corruption was rife in the bosoms of the so-called patriots, and took daily deeper root, and grew ever more luxuriously from that hour to this. We have already shown the eagerness with which these patriots clutched at the good things of office; how they contrived to load themselves with William's crown lands; how they invented the fatal practice of borrowing on the future income, or rather, on the credit of the nation, of forestalling and devouring in their own time the property of posterity. From that date advanced

steadily the corruption of the constitution and the infringement of the popular right. In this work the whigs were not the least active, and far the most arbitrary. By them the Habeas Corpus Act was repeatedly superseded; and in 1716, after the Scotch Rebellion, they made their first unwarrantable attack on the constitution by the repeal of the Triennial Act, and the passing of the Septennial. The severities exercised on the prisoners taken in the Rebellion had excited great disgust, and extended the spirit of disaffection; and, dreading the spirit of a new parliament, they resolved on what Smollett terms the equally odious and effectual expedient" of more than doubling the duration of a sitting in which their power was in the ascendant.

It is very remarkable that the whigs, to this very day, as if ashamed to confess the traitorous deed of their party, have maintained a dogged adherence to the septennial form. However much reformers in other respects, in this they have stood fast. Even when arguing for other reforms on the ground of their being returns to our ancient constitutions, and while quoting proof after proof of this from our history, they have shown the most fixed aversion to return to this most established practice of our ancestors. A few years took away all pretext for the continuance of their constitutional encroachments, but instead of showing a generous haste to make reparation, they clung fast to this greatest blot in their history, and another singular phenomenon showed itself, the tories became reformers,-such miracles can loss of office work-and were the great agitators for the abolition of this whig abuse. To the whigs too we owe the Riot Act, an Act which, however salutary when salutarily employed, is capable of the worst abuse, and was therefore characterised in Parliament, on its first introduction, "as an Act by which a little dirty Justice of the Peace, the meanest tool of a ministry, had it in his power to put twenty or thirty of the best subjects of England into immediate arrest without any trial or ceremony but that of reading a proclamation."

To the great whig leaders, Walpole and North, as we have stated, we are indebted for the complete organisation of the system of corruption, of borough-mongering, of pensioning, bribing parliaments, and ruling by overwhelming majorities of fictitious members. It will be useful to note a few prominent symptoms of the nascent mischief at different periods of its progress.

An inquiry which was made in 1695, presented a singular exhibition of the peculations of the "pure patriots" of the glorious Revolution of 1688. It was proved, for example, that the secretary of the Treasury had taken two hundred guineas for procuring the

payment of arrears due to a regiment; the speaker of the House of Commons had taken a thousand guineas for passing through the house the Orphans' Bill. The chairman of the committee of

this bill was also found guilty of receiving a bribe, and all these gentlemen were expelled. It came to light that the East India Company had paid various members for their secret services from year to year. In 1688, the year of the glorious Revolution itself, 12847. were entered for this purpose; in the two following years, 20967. and 30567.; but in the last year preceding the life and death struggle between the old Company and a new one, this secret service money rose to the enormous sum of 167,000%.! Sir Thomas Cook, who was at once governor of the Company, and a member of the House, was compelled by a bill of pains and penalties to make a disclosure of these matters. In the House of Lords, Danby, the Duke of Leeds, and lord president of the council, zealously resisted this bill, but it passed; and lo! it came out that the lord president himself had pocketed no small share of the money. It was shown that 40,000l. had passed through the hands of one Sir Basil Firebrace, and of this at least ten thousand guineas had found their way into the pockets of the lord president. The Commons commenced an impeachment of Danby, the lord president, who boasted in extenuation of his crime, what he had done for the glorious Revolution. The king dissolved the parliament, and there was an end of this matter.

It would be a curious and most edifying revelation, if we were able to trace out all the bribery of members of parliament and of government, which from that day had poured showers of wealth into the pockets of members, and influenced the fate of the Indies East and West, till the hour that Pitt himself startled the House with the announcement that the Nabob of Arcot had no less than eight representatives in it. The wealth of the Indies has been a perfect rain of corruption in cabinet and parliament. Lord Chatham in his day declared that—" The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of corruption. Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have found their way into parliament by such a torrent of private corruption as no private hereditary fortune could resist."

The reign of Queen Anne was notorious for corruption through the rule of female favourites. As we have said, Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough, was for many years the real queen, and the queen her obedient servant. Sarah gave away, sold, or divided the selling of almost all places; and her husband, the