I do not say that these are considerations with a view to which the war, if otherwise terminable, ought to have been purposely protracted; but I say that, upon the retrospect, we have good reason to rejoice that the war was not closed ingloriously and insecurely, when the latter events of it have been such as have established our security by our glory.

pointed out as the compatriot of Wellington; as one of that nation whose firmness and perseverance have humbled France and rescued Europe. Is there any man that has a heart in his bosom who does not find, in the contemplation of this contrast alone, a recompense for the struggles and the sufferings of years?

The result not

bat most

But, gentlemen, the doing right is not only the most honorable course of action-it is also the most profitable in its result. het bese At any former period of the war, the cial independence of almost all the other countries, our allies would have been to be purchased with sacrifices profusely poured out from the lap of British victory. Not a throne to be re-established, not a province to be evacuated, not a garrison to be withdrawn, but this country would have had to make compensation, out of her conquests, for the concessions obtained from the enemy. Now, happily, this work is already done, either by our efforts or to our hands. The peninsula free-the lawful commonwealth of Euro

I say we have reason to rejoice, that, during the period when the continent was prostrate before France-that, especially during the period when the continental system was in force, we did not shrink from the struggle; that we did not make peace for present and momentary ease, unmindful of the permanent safety and greatness of this country; that we did not leave unsolved the momentous questions, whether this country could maintain itself against France, unaided and alone; or with the continent divided; or with the continent combined against it; whether, when the wrath of the tyrant of the European world was kindled against us with seven-fold fury, we could or could not walk unharmed and unfet-pean states already, in a great measure, restored, tered through the flames?

Great Britain may now appear in the congress of the world, rich in conquests, nobly and rightfully won, with little claim upon her faith or her justice, whatever may be the spontaneous impulse of her generosity or her moderation.

I say we have reason to rejoice that, throughout this more than Punic war, in which it has so often been the pride of our enemy to represent herself as the Rome, and England as the Carthage, of modern times (with at least this color for the Such, gentlemen, is the situation and prospect comparison, that the utter destruction of the mod- of affairs at the moment at which I have the honern Carthage has uniformly been proclaimed to be or to address you. That you, gentlemen, may indispensable to the greatness of her rival)—we have your full share in the prosperity of your have, I say, reason to rejoice that, unlike our as-country, is my sincere and earnest wish. The signed prototype, we have not been diverted by internal dissensions from the vigorous support of a vital struggle; that we have not suffered distress nor clamor to distract our counsels, or to check the exertions of our arms.

The war has been uniformly advocated as the means of an honorable peace.

courage with which you bore up in adverse circumstances eminently entitles you to this reward. For myself, gentlemen, while I rejoice in your returning prosperity, I rejoice also that our connection began under auspices so much less favorable; that we had an opportunity of knowing each other's minds in times when the minds of men are brought to the proof-times of trial and difficulty. I had the satisfaction of avowing to you, and you the candor and magnanimity to approve, the principles and opinions by which my public conduct has uniformly been guided, at a period when the soundness of those opinions and the application of those principles was matter of doubt and controversy. I thought, and I said, at the time of our first meeting, that the cause of England and of civilized Europe must be ultimately triumphant, if we but preserved our spirit untainted and our constancy unshaken. Such an assertion was, at that time, the object of ridicule with many persons: a single year has elapsed, and it is now the voice of the whole world.

Gentlemen, for twenty years that I have sat in Parliament, I have been an advocate of the war. You knew this when you did me the honor to choose me as your representative. I then told you that I was the advocate of the war, because I was a lover of peace; but of a peace that should be the fruit of honorable exertion, a peace that should have a character of dignity, a peace that should be worth preserving, and should be likely to endure. I confess I was not sanguine enough, at that time, to hope that I should so soon have an opportunity of justifying my professions. But I know not why, six weeks hence, such a peace should not be made as England may not only be glad, but proud to ratify. Not such a peace, gentlemen, as that of Amiens-a short and feverish interval of unrefreshing repose. Dur- Gentlemen, we may, therefore, confidently ining that peace, which of you went or sent a son dulge the hope that our opinions will continue to Paris, who did not feel or learn that an En-in unison; that our concurrence will be as corglishman appeared in France shorn of the dignity of his country; with the mien of a suppliant, and the conscious prostration of a man who had consented to purchase his gain or his ease by submission? But let a peace be made to-morrow, such as the allies have now the power to dictate, and the meanest of the subjects of this kingdom shall not walk the streets of Paris without being

dial as it has hitherto been, if unhappily any new occasion of difficulty or embarrassment should hereafter arise.

At the present moment, I am sure, we are equally desirous to bury the recollection of all our differences with others in that general feeling of exultation in which all opinions happily combine.

SPEECH

OF MR. CANNING ON RADICAL REFORM, DELIVERED TO HIS CONSTITUENTS AT LIVERPOOL, MARCH 18, 1820.

INTRODUCTION.

ENGLAND was in a very agitated state during the year 1819. Pecuniary distress was nearly universal, and the agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial interests were reduced to the lowest point of depression.

Sir Francis Burdett, Mr. Hunt, Lord Cochrane, and others, ascribed nearly all the sufferings of the country to one cause, viz., the want of parliamentary reform, and made the most strenuous efforts in favor of annual Parliaments and universal suffrage. Nothing could be more injurious than these efforts to the cause of genuine reform, as advocated by Earl Grey, especially considering the means adopted by the radical reformers to accomplish their object. Itinerant lecturers traversed the country, gathering immense crowds of the lower classes, and inflaming their minds by a sense of injury and oppression. Bodies of men, amounting sometimes to fifty thousand, marched to the place of meeting in regular array, with banners bearing the inscription "Liberty or Death!" and others of a similar import. The magistrates became alarmed, and the measures used to prevent mischief were sometimes unduly severe, and in one instance (that of the meeting at Manchester, August 16th) were attended with the most deplorable consequences. It was the general sentiment of the country, that some measures should be adopted to prevent these evils, and at the meeting of Parliament in November, 1819, the ministry introduced bills for the following purposes, which, from their number, were called the "Six Acts." 1. To take away the right of traversing in cases of misdemeanor; 2. To punish any person found guilty on a second conviction of libel, by fine, imprisonment, and banishment for life; 3. To prevent seditious meetings, requiring the names of seven householders to the requisition, which in future convened any meeting for the discussion of subjects connected with Church or State; 4. To prohibit military training, except under the authority of a magistrate or Lord Lieutenant; 5. To subject cheap periodical pamphlets, on political subjects, to a duty similar to that of newspapers; 6. A bill giving magistrates the power of entering houses by night or by day, for the purpose of seizing arms believed to be collected for unlawful purposes. These bills were all carried by large majorities; the entering houses by night, and the severity of the restrictions on the press, were chiefly objected to; but there appeared a general concurrence in the necessity of strong measures.

Soon after these acts were passed, a new election took place; and Mr. Canning came forward to vindicate the above measures, and also to resist every attempt at parliamentary reform by identifying the whole plan with these radical views. The speech is certainly a very able one, and will interest the reader as giving the Tory side of the argument, though it by no means meets the question as presented by such reformers as Earl Grey and Mr. Brougham.

Recent po

SPEECH, &c. GENTLEMEN,-Short as the interval is since I last met you in this place on a similar litical evils. occasion, the events which have filled up that interval have not been unimportant. The great moral disease which we then talked of as gaining ground on the community has, since that period, arrived at its most extravagant height; and since that period, also, remedies have been applied to it, if not of permanent cure, at least of temporary mitigation.

The reme.

Gentlemen, with respect to those remediesI mean with respect to the transactions dies applied. of the last short session of Parliament, previous to the dissolution-I feel that it is my duty, as your representative, to render to you some account of the part which I took in that assembly to which you sent me; I feel it my duty also, as a member of the government by which those measures were advised. Upon occasions of such trying exigency as those which we have lately experienced, I hold it to be of the very essence of our free and popular Constitution, that

an unreserved interchange of sentiment should take place between the representative and his constituents; and if it accidentally happens that he who addresses you as your representative, stands also in the situation of a responsible adviser of the Crown, I recognize in that more rare occurrence a not less striking or less valuable peculiarity of that Constitution under which we have the happiness to live-by which a minister of the Crown is brought into contact with the great body of the community, and the service of the King is shown to be a part of the service of the people.

Gentlemen, it has been one advantage of the transactions of the last session of Parliament, that while they were addressed to meet the evils which had grown out of charges heaped upon the House of Commons, they had also, in a great measure, falsified the charges themselves.

I would appeal to the recollection of every man who now hears me-of any the most careless estimator of public sentiment, or the most in

Signal change

That such a loss, and the recollections and reflections naturally arising from it, must have had a tendency to revive and refresh the attachment to monarchy, and to root that attachment deeper in the hearts of the people, might easily be shown by reasoning; but a feeling, truer than all reasoning, anticipates the result, and renders the process of argument unnecessary. So far, therefore, has this great calamity brought with it its own compensation, and conspired to the restoration of peace throughout the country with the measures adopted by Parliament.

different spectator of public events, whether any | been the guide and guardian of his people through country, in any two epochs, however many a weary and many a stormy pilgrimage; in the condition distant, of its history, ever present- scarce less a guide, and quite as much a guardof the country. ed such a contrast with itself as this ian, in the cloud of his evening darkness, as in country in November, 1819, and this country in the brightness of his meridian day.1 February, 1820? Do I exaggerate when I say, that there was not a man of property who did not tremble for his possessions ?-that there was not a man of retired and peaceable habits who did not tremble for the tranquillity and security of his home?—that there was not a man of orderly and religious principles who did not fear that those principles were about to be cut from under the feet of succeeding generations? Was there any man who did not apprehend the Crown to be in danger? Was there any man attached to the other branches of the Constitution who did not contemplate with anxiety and dismay the rapid and apparently irresistible diffusion of doctrines hostile to the very existence of Parliament as at present constituted, and calculated to excite not hatred and contempt merely, but open and audacious force, especially against the House of Commons? What is, in these respects, the situation of the country now? Is there a man of property who does not feel the tenure by which he holds his possessions to have been strengthened? Is there a man of peace who does not feel his domestic tranquillity to have been secured? Is there a man of moral and religious principles who does not look forward with better hope to see his children educated in those principles?—who does not hail, with renewed confidence, the revival and re-establishment of that moral and religious sense which had been attempted to be obliterated from the hearts of mankind?

This change produced by

complained of

Well, gentlemen, and what has intervened between the two periods? A calling of the action of that degraded Parliament; a meeting the so much of that scoffed at and derided House Parliament. of Commons; a concurrence of those three branches of an imperfect Constitution, not one of which, if we are to believe the radical reformers, lived in the hearts, or swayed the feelings, or commanded the respect of the nation; but which, despised as they were while in a state of separation and inaction, did, by a co-operation of four short weeks, restore order, confidence, a reverence for the laws, and a just sense of their own legitimate authority.

Regulation

lic meeting

And, gentlemen, what was the character of those measures? The best eulogy of them I take to be this: it may be said of large b of them, as has been said of some of the most consummate productions of literary art, that, though no man beforehand had exactly anticipated the scope and the details of them, there was no man, when they were laid before him, who did not feel that they were precisely such as he would himself have suggested. So faithfully adapted to the case which they were framed to meet, so correctly adjusted to the degree and nature of the mischief they were intended to control, that, while we all feel that they have done their work, I think none will say there has been any thing in them of excess or supererogation.

- whether I have in

We were loudly assured by the reformers, that the test throughout the country by which those who were ambitious of seats in the new Parliament would be tried, was to be they had supported those measures. quired, with as much diligence as was compatible with my duties here, after the proceedings of other elections, and I protest I know no place yet, besides the hustings of Westminster and Southwark, at which that menaced test has been put to any candidates. To me, indeed, it was not put as a test, but objected as a charge. You know how that charge was answered; and the result is to me a majority of 1300 out of 2000 voters upon the poll.

liberty of the

But, gentlemen, though this question has not, as was threatened, been the watch- The sterdictal word of popular elections, every other es meeting, 30 effort has, nevertheless, been indus- restraint the triously employed to persuade the people people that their liberties have been essentially abridged by the regulation of popular meetings. Against that one of the measures passed by Par

Another event, indeed, has intervened, in itself of a most painful nature, but powerful in aiding and confirming the impressions which the assembling and the proceedings of Parliament were calculated to produce. I mean the loss which the nation has sustained by the death of a Sov-liament, it is that the attacks of the radical reereign, with whose person all that is venerable in monarchy has been identified in the eyes of successive generations of his subjects; a Sovereign whose goodness, whose years, whose sorrows and sufferings must have softened the hearts of the most ferocious enemies of kingly power; whose active virtues, and the memory of whose virtues, when it pleased Divine Providence that they should be active no more, have

formers have been particularly directed. Gentlemen, the first answer to this averment is, that the act leaves untouched all the constitutional modes of assembly which have been known to the nation since it became free. We are fond of dating our freedom from the Revolution. I should be glad to know in what period since the

1 This refers to the King's derangement from 1811.

Revolution (up to a very late period indeed, which I will specify)—in what period of those reigns growing out of the Revolution-I mean, of the first reigns of the house of Brunswick-did it enter into the head of man, that such meetings could be holden, or that the Legislature would tolerate the holding of such meetings, as disgraced this kingdom for some months previous to the last ses-way? Can any reasonable being doubt? Can sion of Parliament? When, therefore, it is asserted that such meetings were never before suppressed, the simple answer is, they were never before systematically attempted to be holden.

| ther they nor I can gain our livelihood. I call upon the laws to afford me that protection; and if the laws in this country can not afford it, depend upon it, I and my manufacturers must emigrate to some country where they can." Here is a conflict of rights, between which what is the decision? Which of the two claims is to give

Such meetings

Constitution.

I verily believe the first meeting of the kind that was ever attempted and tolerunknown to the ated (I know of none anterior to it) was that called by Lord George Gordon, in St. George's Fields, in the year 1780, which led to the demolition of chapels and dwelling-houses, the breaking of prisons, and the conflagration of London. Was England never free till 1780? Did British liberty spring to light from the ashes of the metropolis? What! was there no freedom in the reign of George the Second? None in that of George the First? None in the reign of Queen Anne or of King William ? Beyond the Revolution I will not go. But I have always heard that British liberty was established long before the commencement of the late reign; nay, that in the late reign (according to popular politicians) it rather sunk and retrograded; and yet never till that reign was such an abuse of popular meetings dreamed of, much less erected into a right not to be questioned by magistrates, and not to be controlled by Parliament.

any honest man hesitate? Let private justice or public expediency decide, and can the decision by possibility be other than that the peaceable and industrious shall be protected-the turbulent and mischievous put down?

These immense mass meetings not essential to

tition.

But what similarity is there between tumults such as these and an orderly meeting, recognized by the law for all legitimate purposes of discussion or peti- the right of pe tion? God forbid that there should not be modes of assembly by which every class of this great nation may be brought together to deliberate on any matters connected with their interest and their freedom. It is, however, an inversion of the natural order of things, it is a disturbance of the settled course of society, to represent discussion as every thing, and the ordinary occupations of life as nothing. To protect the peaceable in their ordinary occupations is as much the province of the laws, as to provide opportunities of discussion for every purpose to which it is necessary and properly applicable. The laws do both; but it is no part of the contrivance of the laws that immense multitudes should wantonly be brought together, month after month, and day after day, in places where the very bringing toDo I deny, then, the general right of the peo-gether of a multitude is of itself the source of All social rights ple to meet, to petition, or to delib-terror and of danger. tion for the gen- erate upon their grievances?

liable to restric

eral good.

God

forbid ! But social right is not a simple, abstract, positive, unqualified term. Rights are, in the same individual, to be compared with his duties; and rights in one person are to be balanced with the rights of others. Let us take this right of meeting in its most extended construction and most absolute sense. The persons who called the meeting at Manchester tell you that they had a right to collect together countless multitudes to discuss the question of parliamentary reform; to collect them when they would and where they would, without consent of magistrates, or concurrence of inhabitants, or reference to the comfort or convenience of the neighborhood. May not the peaceable, the industrious inhabitant of Manchester say, on the other hand, "I have a right to quiet in my house; I have a right to carry on my manufactory, on which not my existence only and that of my children, but that of my workmen and their numerous families depends. I have a right to be protected in the exercise of this my lawful calling; I have a right to be protected, not against violence and plunder only, against fire and sword, but against the terror of these calamities, and against the risk of these inflictions; against the intimidation or seduction of my workmen; or against the distraction of that attention and the interruption of that industry, without which nei

ly opposed to

The spirit of the

It is no part of the provision of the laws, nor is it in the spirit of them, that such They are directmultitudes should be brought togeth- the spirit of the er at the will of unauthorized and ir- English laws. responsible individuals, changing the scene of meeting as may suit their caprice or convenience, and fixing it where they have neither property. nor domicil, nor connection. law goes directly the other way. It is, if I may so express myself, eminently a spirit of corporation. Counties, parishes, townships, guilds, professions, trades, and callings, form so many local and political subdivisions, into which the people of England are distributed by the law; and the pervading principle of the whole is that of vicinage or neighborhood; by which each man is held to act under the view of his neighbors; to lend his aid to them, to borrow theirs; to share their councils, their duties, and their burdens; and to bear with them his share of responsibility for the acts of any of the members of the community of which he forms a part.

Observe, I am not speaking here of the reviled and discredited statute law only, but of that venerable common law to which our reformers are so fond of appealing on all occasions, against the statute law by which it is modified, explained, or enforced. Guided by the spirit of the one, no less than by the letter of the other, what man is there in this country who can not point to the