worst, as our mountain of bad and useless laws can testify, are lawyers, cunning, despotic, and corrupt. Who that ever attempted to carry a just measure through parliament, did not find cause to rue the presence and the tricks of the law lords in the upper house? Who does not know what hosts of good laws they have immolated there on the altar of corruption and despotism-what hosts of delusive and destructive ones they have given birth to ? The most fatal portion of the aristocratic upper house has been unquestionably the lawyers. What the corrupt minister has planned, and the corrupt borough-monger has been ready to support, the tribe of titled lawyers have with practical subtlety made plausible with their tongues. They have made "the worse appear the better reason," to the ruin of the country. In a former page I have presented a solemn warning of what a tribe of lawyers in a legislature are likely to do. In the list of those in the Irish parliament, the number of lawyers who sold themselves for money or promotion to the English ministry for carrying the Union, are no less than thirty-four. For really useful purposes of legislation, there should be a mere sprinkling of lawyers in the houses of parliament; just sufficient to assist in giving force and precision in legislative enactments, but not so many as to enable them to warp or mislead the popular spirit of legislation. While ample reward is always certain in the emoluments of their profession to good lawyers, state honours should be most sparingly and cautiously bestowed on this dangerous class of men. Why should whole troops of this class reap the honours that are only due to great and distinguished patriots? What are the great national achievements that have seated so many on the peerage benches? Are they suffrages in the popular cause?-achievements in the popular cause? or the projection and establishment of institutions for the security of liberty? The answer to these questions will present themselves to every honest and sagacious mind. But it is not to the upper house that this evil confines itself. The lower house is but the passage to the upper, and into that presses a swarm of lawyers eager to mount up by the same acts, to the same gilded eminence. Without are other swarms ready to rush in. The weight of law in parliament favours the prevalence of lawyers all over the country; and under this patronage and support, to what has not the system of law, and the legion of lawyers grown in this country? The very land groans under its monstrous host of lawyers. Like the reptile curse of Pharaoh, they enter every man's house, and come up into every man's kneading-trough and money-box. Their parchments are a net that is cast over every acre of land in England; their red tapes bind the limbs of every man in the country. Look round you in cities their name is Legion; look round in the little town and even the village-they are the only flourishing men there. Ask any man if he be not in love with lawyers, and he stares and utters a curse. Yet they have woven themselves into every man's business, and made themselves indispensable; you might as well attempt to get rid of your skins, as of lawyers, who stick, in troth, pretty fast to them. In a word, there is no craft, be it priestcraft, aristocraft, or any other, that so needs the pruning-knife of reform as the craft of the law. All men, and none more than the respectable members of the profession themselves, feel and acknowledge this; but where shall it begin? In the House of Peers? It is full of lawyers! In the House of Commons? It is full also of those whose eyes are fixed on the woolsack and the bench, and seeing coronets glitter there, forget the groans of those over whose bruised carcases they hurry and climb. Looking, then, to the House of Peers-to the mode by which it has been filled-to the materials out of which its members have been made—and to the use which they have made of their power-the view is equally melancholy and disgraceful to us as a people. Who and what are the aristocracy of England, let this chapter answer; let the next display to us who are the genuine nobles and builders of the national greatness. THE most amazing exhibition of inconsistency of national character in the whole history of the world is in that of the people of England. The most active, the most shrewd, the most practical and matter-of-fact, and at the same time the most adventurous and successful of people on the face of the earth, it cannot fail to strike every reader of their annals with unfeigned astonishment, to see how at all times, but still more as they advance towards the summit of national greatness, in wealth, in ingenuity, in commerce, and vastness of empire, they have totally neglected the one means of securing to themselves the fruits of their own labours and genius-that of good and selfgovernment. We behold them with unspeakable surprise, piling up with indefatigable energy advantage on advantage, and glory on glory, and suffering, with the most one-eyed unconsciousness, a race of lazy but cunning drones to filch from them the product of their toils and triumphs. We see them destroying tyrants, chasing them from the throne when in the shape of kings, but suffering them in legions when in the shape of lords. When a king seeks to destroy their constitution, they start up at once, and take off his head; but when an aristocracy does the very same thing, they tolerate, nay, they are accused by foreigners of even worshipping it. From the hour that the aristocracy contrived to secure a majority in the House of Commons, the constitution was as completely at an end as when Charles Stuart entered there and demanded, with armed troopers at his back, that the opposers of ship-money should be given up to him. Yet the acute and high-spirited British people have gone on for a hundred and fifty years dreaming of their constitution when it was in its grave, and the aristocratic usurpers were enriched at their expense, and revelling in the profits of their trade, their manufactures, and their colonies. Had this English people been a mere plodding and labouring people, dense and dull of brain, but ready to execute, like good Chinese, any piece of business or mechanism that the bright and more inventive genius of a really higher class had originated; had the aristocracy of England been the party which struck out and built up arts, sciences, and philosophy; which had constructed ships, and discovered and planted new lands; had invented machinery, and brought to light steam, and gas, and all the chemical agents that have vitalised our stupendous structure of manufacturing and social existence; then there would have been no wonder in the matter! Then we might have seen the aristocracy playing strange pranks, and arrogating strange honours and emoluments at the popular cost; and however we might have lamented, we could not have marvelled. But the paradox of the thing is, that when we look at the two classes, and ask which is the originating class—the class of genius and of projective as well as executive energy, we stand in blank amaze to discover that the aristocracy are as barren as the desert sand, and as absorbent of all good. The people are the fruitful soil of all genius, of all imagination, of all constructiveness, of all valour, daring, enter prise, success, and national glory. The aristocracy are the mere vermin that ride in the lion's mane, because they have cleverly located themselves out of the reach of his paws. That I may not seem too severe on the aristocratic class of the present day, I will quote the description of an aristocrat's life; drawn by one of their own class-one who had seen what he described intimately and well. Behold him, Freshman! forced no more to groan Constant to nought, save hazard and a whore, Fooled, pillaged, dunned, he wastes his time away, Master of Arts, as hells and clubs proclaim, Where scarce a blackleg bears a brighter name! Launched into life, extinct his early fire, Manhood declines-age palsies every limb; Counts cent. per cent., and smiles or vainly frets BYRON; Hints from Horace, pp. 66, 67. If we were to ask a series of questions on the great events of our history and national progress, the answers would come out, as it regarded the two classes, with a singular significance. For instance Who laid the foundations of our free institutions, parliaments, representation, and trial by jury? The old Anglo-Saxon people. Who destroyed these to a great practical extent, and rent the soil from its ancient possessors by the introduction of feudalism? The aristocracy of the Danish-Normans. Who attempted to wring the Magna Charta from King John, and failed? The barons. Who won it? The bowmen of England, who drove John and the barons too, and their invited French king, before them, and compelled Henry III. to give them a still better charter. Who tore the kingdom to pieces by cruel wars and wranglings for the crown, till the reign of Henry VII. ? The aristocracy. Who, meantime, cultivated the ground, originated trade, raised the country in wealth, strength, and respect, spite of its internal aristocratic dissonance ? The people. Who trembled before the Tudors, and became their instruments even to the commission of systematic murders in Scotland and at home? The aristocracy. Who made the Tudor Elizabeth tremble in the midst of her haughtiness, and retract her arbitrary commands? The people in their parliament. Who joined with the Stuarts to destroy the liberties of the nation, and to rule by a standing army? The aristocracy. Who put down king and aristocracy, and made the first example in the world of a headless king, for the warning of bad monarchs, and the encouragement of injured nations? The people of England. Who recalled the debauched Charles II. to this country, and bargained with him for their own profit and the popular wrong? The aristocracy. Who again drove the Stuarts from the throne ? The people. Who got the credit of it? Seven bishops, whose "Diana of the Ephesians," the church, |