harpy thirst of plunder and of blood must be steadily resisted. Our aristocratic government, through the Board of Control, keep up and exert a vast patronage in India. The patronage of the president of this board alone, independent of his salary of 5000l. a-year, is about twenty-one thousand pounds. But the whole aristocracy have an interest in keeping up wars in India, that their sons as officers, especially in these times of European peace, may find here both employment and promotion. This, then, the Company in its plans of peace and cultivation has to contend against; and few are they who are aware of the formidable nature of this power as it is exerted in this direction, and of the strange and unconstitutional legislative authority with which they have armed themselves for this purpose. How few are they who are aware that, while the East India Company has been blamed as the planners, authors, and movers of the fatal and atrocious invasion of Cabul, that the Directors of the Company only first, and to their great amazement, learned the outbreak of that war from the public Indian papers. So far from that war being one of their originating, it was most opposed to their present policy, and disastrous to their affairs. How then came this monstrous war about, and who then did originate it? To explain this, requires us to lay open a monstrous stretch of unconstitutional power on the part of our government-a monstrous stratagem for the maintenance of their aristocratic views in India, which it is wonderful could have escaped the notice and reprehension of the public. Let the reader mark well what follows. In the last charter, granted in 1834, a clause was introduced, binding a secret committee of the East India Company, consisting of three persons only, the chairman, deputy chairman, and senior director, who are solemnly sworn to this work, to receive private despatches from the Board of Control, and without communicating them to a single individual besides themselves, to forward them to India, where the receivers are bound, without question or appeal, to enforce their immediate execution. By this inquisitorial system, this worse than Spanish or Venetian system of secret decrees, government has reserved to itself a direction of the affairs of India, freed from all constitutional or representative check, and reduced the India Company to a mere cat's-paw. By the sworn secrecy and implicit obedience of this mysterious triumvirate, the Company is made the unconscious instrument of measures most hostile to its own views, and most fatal to its best interests. It may at any hour become the medium of a secret order which may threaten the very destruction of its empire. Such was the case with the war of Cabul. The aristocratic government at home planned and ordered it; and the unconscious Company was made at once to carry out a scheme so atrocious, so wicked and unprincipled, as well as destructive to its plans of civil economy, and to bear also the infamy of it. Awaking, therefore, to the tremendous nature of the secret powers thus introduced into their machinery by government, the Company determined to exercise also a power happily intrusted to them. Hence the recall of Lord Ellenborough, who, in obedience to aristocratic views at home, was not only running headlong over all their plans of pacific policy, but with his armies and elephants was treading under foot their cotton and sugar plantations. Hence, on the other hand, the favour and support which this warlike lord finds with the great martial duke, and the home government. If the people of England, if Young Engand, or any other party or body wish to see our manufacturers employed, our commerce flourishing, and education and comfort spreading at home, they must fix their eyes steadily on India, and check any warlike aggression there, and strengthen the hands of the Company in the pursuit of peace and the growth of abundance. Nay, if they wish to prevent the destruction of our Indian empire altogether, they must call at once, loudly and boldly, for the extirpation of this arbitrary and un-English clause from the charter of the India Company. They must demand that this sending of secret despatches through a sworn and secret triumvirate shall cease. Till then there is for our tenure of India, or for its advance in prosperity, no security; for aristocracy still looks with wishful eyes in that direction, and mighty is its power. As it has sacrificed the national interests to its selfish views through all ages, it will continue to sacrifice them still; and it is notorious that from the first rise of our Indian power, bribery has never been wanting to bend ministers or parliament to its wishes. The very charter of the present Company was obtained by enormous bribes to men in power. Before the glorious Revolution, it seldom exceeded 1,2007. annually; but after it, it speedily advanced to 90,000l. annually. The Duke of Leeds, the minister in 1793, was impeached for a bribe of 50007.; and 10,000l. was said to be traced even to the pocket of the king.* Let us be assured that aristocratic schemes will not be easily eluded. With the dreadful engine that they have now contrived to get into their hands for the maintenance of their class patronage in India-a patronage that is bound up with bloodshed, aggres * Macpherson's Annals, ii. 652-662. sion, and the destruction of commerce-they cannot be too closely watched; but the possession of India, and the prosperity of England, depend upon their defeat. Let us fix our eyes steadily on India and on peace! Such has been the history and effects of aristocratic management of colonial affairs in general. Of late years, government have began to legislate for young colonies, and their proceedings have been disastrous enough. Adopting the Wakefieldian scheme of selling all colonial lands, on the pretext of sending over the necessary labourers, they have introduced the most ruinous spirit of speculation into Australia, as well as of official peculation and abuse; and the very existence, not only of these colonies, but of New Zealand, has been endangered. This also needs a vigilant public eye. But here we must pause. In a rapid survey, we have beheld how everything-crown, charter, church, House of Commons, crown lands, public charities, and even the vast extent of our own colonies, are engrossed and enjoyed by this mighty and all-grasping aristocracy. We have one little step further to advance, and to inquire, Who then are in reality these aristocrats who thus rule over and ruin us? And who are the people who thus submit patiently to be devoured ? CHAPTER XXV. AN ANALYSIS OF THE PEERAGE. "Not all that heralds rake from coffined clay, CHILDE HAROLD, c. i. p. 12. "Almost the whole town are my kindred, but in particular, my Lord Turnabout, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-speech; also Mr. Smoothman, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Mr. Anything; and the parson of our parish, Mr. Two-Tongues, was my mother's own brother by father's side; and to tell you the truth, I am become a gentleman of good quality; yet my great-grandfather was but a waterman, looking one way and rowing another; and I got most of my estate by the same occupation."-Mr. BYENDS, IN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, If there be one thing more ominous than another in opening a book of the peerage, it is the queer look of the armorial escutcheons by which the aristocratic families are distinguished. Are these meant to be characteristic? Are they meant to be emblems of the nature of aristocracy-of the origin, history, and merits of these people? Then surely the sooner the whole body of them were swept out of civilised society the better. Surely the heralds must have laughed in their sleeves as they designed and emblazoned aristocratic arms. Sly dogs they must have been, pretending a glory and perpetrating a satire. But in the satire what a truth! The whole emblazonment of aristocracy is one manifesto of savage barbarism, brute force, and propensity to robbery and plunder. What are these objects on their shields? Daggers, swords, lions' heads, dogs' heads, arrow-heads, boars' heads, cannon balls, clubs, with a medley of stars, moons, and unmeaning figures. What are the crests of these arms? Lascivious goats, rampant lions, fiery dragons, and griffins gone crazed; bulls' heads, block-heads, arms with uplifted daggers, beasts with daggers, and vultures tearing up helpless birds. What, again, are the supporters of these shields? What are the emblems of the powers by which they are maintained and upheld? The demonstration is deeply significant. They are the most singular assemblage of all that is fierce, savage, rampageous, villanous, lurking, treacherous, bloodthirsty, cruel, and bestial in bestial natures. They are infuriated lions, boars, and tigers; they are raging bulls, filthy goats, horrid hyenas, snarling dogs, drunken bears, and mad rams; they are foxes, wolves, panthers, everything that is creeping, sneaking, thievish, and perfidious. Nay, nature cannot furnish emblems extensive enough, and so start up to our astonished sight the most hideous shapes of fiendlike dragons and griffins, black, blasted as by infernal fires; the most fuliginous of monsters; and if the human shape is assumed for the guardians and supporters of aristocracy, they are wild and savage men, armed with clubs and grim with hair, scowling brute defiance, and seeming ready to knock down Ay, the very birds of any man at the command of their lords. prey are called in; and eagles, vultures, cormorants, in most expressive attitudes, with most ludicrous embellishments of crowned heads, collared necks, escutcheoned sides, and with hoisted wings and beaks of open and devouring wrath, proclaim the same great truth, that aristocracy is of the class of what the Germans call Raub-thieren, or robber-beasts-in our vernacular, beasts of prey. It is, indeed, a remarkable display. All is brute and destructive in their emblematic distinctions. There is scarcely a trace of any symbol of the intellectual, civilized, or benevolent. Aristocracy is, in fact, of brute origin-it cannot disguise itself. They who have raised our race from brutality and baseness of nature, by science, by philosophy, by poetry, by religion, and works of love, have no sign and banner of distinction here. They who are the genuine nobles of the earth, and the supporters of whose shields would be angels of mercy; the divine hand put forth from the depths of invisibility to sustain the heroes of humanity amid the war of prejudices and of ignorant hatred; the morning and the evening star that have seen them rising to think and act for their suffering fellows, and seeking out by night suffering virtue, forsaken poverty, and unmerited distress, in dark alleys and dim hovels, these would have far different insignia. Children, orphans, and oppressed children that have been raised from anguish, and plucked from the atmosphere of moral plague, would arise and stand as their supporters. Gratitude, homage, reverence, and weeping affection in every heavenly, radiant, or venerable shape, would uphold the shields of the true divinities of the earth, the genuine sons and servants of the all-pure and all-embracing God. Such men as Alfred the Great, the one genuine king of a thousand years, a kingly soul, a king of virtue and of light; such men as Wycliffe, as the great martyrs, and the great philosophers and enlighteners, would have noble escutcheons and illustrious supporters in the ranks of a genuine nobility. Kings and queens would be proud to stand in crown and royal robes to do them homage. Milton, Marvel, Hampden, Sidney, Russell, Bacon as the philosopher, Newton, Howard, Jenner, who subdued the great plague of the small-pox, Bentham, Watt, Bolton, Davy, Arkwright, Scott, Wordsworth, every man that has contracted the empire of ignorance and misery, and extended that of power, knowledge, and enjoyment, would have a shield in the house of the true national nobility. But no such men are found here. Such men have their shields and statues in a far nobler house,-in the Walhalla of the universe, and their pedestals are hewn from the eternal quarries of grateful humanity. Those who have assumed the name of nobles, stand confessed by their very symbols as well as by their deeds, to be a race of impostors. They count amongst them, it is true, a solitary Nelson, a solitary Byron, a few Hoods, Ansons, and St. Vincents, who have fought and achieved, but too often, like the great Duke of the present day, in the cause of false principles and royal despotism, making the bloody path of their victories but fresh tracks of misery and degradation to the coming generations. A few such there are, take them as a whole, about a score, and some of these of questionable merit for morality and genuine patriotism; but for the U |