The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1836-09-23 00:00:00

SEPT, 23, 1836,

excellent peer Lord Skelmersdale, on whom the angel
spirit which once defended Lathorn House, in the foru

of a woman, seems to have alighted, in the fervour of his.
Protestantism, as its present possessor. But before we
proceed to the combat against the mighty oligarchs, it is
needful, as our constitutional championship is yet young
with our Standard spear to select a trusty and able
knight to perform the part of esquire to us in our conflict
with the erudite cynics in whiggery, and the acute rea-
soners in radical logic ; for as regards the jesuitical advo-
cates of popery we dare the.rn single-handed to the en-
counter. Spirit Cif the mighty Burke, thou wilt respond.
to our call! From the electric fire of thy genius we will
throw a light on the elements from which the assailed
British Peerage has been compounded. We will take
your authority as our standard—as that of the greatest.
political philosopher, since the days of Aristotle and we
invite the greatest amongst the whigs, and the most pro-
found ainunst the liberals, to furnish the counterpart in,
their splendid olivirchy, or their reformed republic !

" To be bred in a place of estimation,—to see nothing low or
sordid from one's infancy,—to be habituated to I flu censorial in-
spection of the public eye,—to stand upon such elevated ground
as to be enabled to take a view of the wide-spread combinatic,a
of men and affairs iu a large society,—to have leisure to read,
reflect, and converse,—to be enabled to draw around them the
wise and the learned, wherever they are to be found,—to be
taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty,—tv
be habituated in armies to command and to obey,—to be formed
to exercise the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and cir-
cumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed
with impunity, and the slightest mistakes thaw on the most se-
rious consequenses,—to be led to a guarded and well-regulated
conduct, from a sense of feeling that you are considered the in-
structor of your fellow-citizens, in their highest concerns,—to be
employed as an administrator of laws and justice, and to be
thereby amongst the first benefactors of mankind,—to be a pro-
fessor of political science—to be amongst such traders, who.
from their success, are presumed to possess clear and vigorous
understandings,—to possess the virtues of diligence, order, con-
stancy, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative
justice;—those are the circumstances of men that form, what I
should call a natural aristocracy, withoao which there is no
NATION !"

From this profound combination in our great society,
growing gradually from a small beginning, has arisen the
second estate of this realm—the English Peerage. If
men as individuals do not attain to one or other of the
component parts or limbs of this deeply described super-
structure, the fault is within themselves—not in the con-
stitution which has cemented its construction, and wherein
the great principle of redemption, renovation, and im-
provement still exists in its pristine energy ! Again, we
call upon our opponents—our Chronicles, our Globes, our
Suns, and our Mercuries, to favour us with the elements
of their social system, formed upon the break up of that
we have described from the pen of their Master—their
towering superior in reason, comprehension, learning,
philosophy, and religion. Let us have no false play upon
words, nor garbled sentences,—if their system or their
foundation of its principles, admits of illustration, let us
have it in a substantive form. We have thrown down
the gauntlet to them ; but in so doing, we are not pre-
pared to grapple with shadows!
From the beautiful association described by Burke, re-
sults the theory of the British constitutional monarchy,—
a government of King, Lords, and Commons. Let us
now canvass briefly the moral consequences which must
inevitably accrue from the threatened design of making
the peerage elective for the question is no longer treated
as a matter of hypothetical speculation, but asserted as a
principle, by the destructive movement party, the com-
pound Irish and liberal junta out of doors, and tacitly
supported by the whig government, as the medium of
pacifying their faithful allies, and of enabling the " mon-
' ster Chimera," so poetically described by Lord Wilton,
to move forward, whisking its serpentine tail and carry-
ing destruction in its course. As we do not aspire to the
high learning of the modern Solons who like my Lord
Plunkett deem history an " old almanack, and deep phi-
losophy obsolete," we must found our judgment of the sci-
ence of legislation and government upon the experience
of ancient history, supported by the events of modern
times,—and here we discover the astounding truth, that
a purely popular assembly never was, and from the very
nature of its composition, never can be rendered fit to
govern. All the struggles about liberty, and the con-
tentions between the rival principles of monarchy, abso-
lutism, and republicanism, since men entered on the wide
field of society, corroborate this point. In every well-
regulated state, there must be some balancing authority
interposed as a corrective, between the rash passion of
popular influence, and the more sober energy of general
or national legislation. It is needful that there should be
some consolidated principle of deliberative action for the
purpose of affording time for reflection to the people at
large, who are all deeply interested in the issue; and not
merely a party, or section of the people, influenced by
some peculiar views of self-interested or local advantage,
or led on by some designing leader or leaders. It is
needful that there should be some well constituted de-
fence, framed by the general wisdom of the nation, to
act as a counterpoise to the fantastic schemes of indivi-
duals, or to repel the undue ebullition of popular excite-
ment. This controlling principle has been admitted and
its necessity urged by the most intelligent men in every
age, and those who deny it, display a total ignorance of
the science of government, or the desire to pervert the
truth, for the furtherance of impure objects.
Again,—the institution of an independent senate, as
illustrated in the ancient governments of Greece and of
Rome, has been the inevitable resource against the fluc-
tuation—the fury and the ruin of republicanistp, or the
tyranny of arbitrary monarchy. The glory, and the
strength of ancient Rome rested in its Patrician Senate,
—its misery and declension in the destruction of that
body, or of its due authority. This then is matter of
history—let our antagonists disprove it, if they can. But
we can go further—the minor and very republican go-
vernments of modern Italy were only kept together so
long as they were preserved from direct popular control.
Even America, the vaunted perfection of republican in-
stitutions, has a controlling senate,—her legislature is po-
pular, and her executive monarchical, and so are ours,
with this distinction, that our Second Chamber, and our
Presidency, as best adapted to a matured state, are re-
moved from direct popular influence, and therefore not so
likely to be counteracted by the dictation of impure party
spirit or annihilated by the fickleness or the turbulence
of an unreflecting multitude, set free from all restraint.
The ingredients of the dark cup of sedition, which drove
France into madness, anarchy, and atheism, were mixed
up by those very pretenders to liberty, who, swamping
all orders and ranks in one legislativs assembly, made the
tyrannous will of the populace the supreme law, and thus
destroyed even its boasted republic,—it was left to one
master mind to restore order, by introducing a military
despotism. What would be the condition of Britain,
within a very few short years, were an irresponsible oli-
garchy—the talismanic hope of the modern whigs, elected
by the majority of Irish papists, and Scotch radicals, de-
cide the legislation for this now independent empire ?
What security would there remain for the permanency of
the monarchy, on the one hand, or the church on the
other, or even for individual possessions, under the acts
of a Chamber, subject to the free domination of the hero
of Derrynane, and his amiable colleagues, Messieurs
Hume, Roebuck, and Molesworth ? It is therefore es-
sential to the liberties of this Christian kingdom, that
the second estate of the legislature should remain tho •
roughly independent, as the guardian of such important
trusts, In the hands of a class of men, as its members,
eminent for their probity—their fortitude, and their
knowledge, and by their station retained as remote from
impure influence or control, as the judgment seat itself.
It is a well-known apophthegm of the great Lord Bur-
leigh, that "England can never be ruined but by her
Parliament "—and it has also been observed by Sir Mat-
thew Hale, with reference to the high legislative authority
and grace importance of the second estate, that "this
being the highest and greatest court, over which none
other can have, or exercise, any jurisdiction in theking-
dom; if by any means a misgovernment should in any t
way fall upon it, the subjects of this kingdom arelt.
without all manner of remedy." Here is our ease against
the Derrynane cabiucts--we have shown the consequences
of their threatened projected centralization of powers 10
•
the hands of an oligarchy; and the consequent super'o
cession of the monarchy of this realm, us' make v.lO