interest or credit of the old constitutional Whigs should ever have been compromised in public opinion, by any weakness or rashness of ours:-and that not only because we certainly have no warrant to hold ourselves out as their spokesmen, but because, though agreeing in the main with their tenets, we do not profess to acknowledge their authority, or to be guided in our opinions by any thing but our own imperfect lights. The imputations to which we now allude, however, certainly do not touch us individually- at least in the view we take of them, but are plainly applicable to all who happen to stand midway between the two contending factions, and therefore in an eminent degree to the true constitutional Whigs of 1688-with whom, in this question, we are proud to be identified.

The topics of reproach which these two opposite parties have recently joined in directing against us, seem to be chiefly two-First, that our doctrines are timid, vacillating, compromising, and inconsistent; and, secondly, that the party which holds them, and to which they are addressed, is small, weak, despised, and unpopular. These are the texts, we think, of those whose vocation it has lately become, to preach against us, from the pulpits either of servility or democratical reform. But it is necessary to open them up a little farther, before we enter on our defence.

The first charge then is, That the Whigs are essentially an inefficient, trimming, half-way sort of party-too captious, penurious, and disrespectful to authority, to be useful servants in a Monarchy, and too aristocratical, cautious, and tenacious of old institutions, to deserve the confidence, or excite the sympathies, of a generous and enlightened People. Their advocates, accordingly-and we ourselves in an especial manner— are accused of dealing in contradictory and equivocating doctrines; of practising a continual see-saw of admissions and retractions; of saying now a word for the people-now one for the aristocracy-now one for the Crown; of paralysing all our liberal propositions by some timid and paltry reservation, and never being betrayed into a truly popular sentiment without instantly chilling and neutralizing it by some cold fears of excess, some cautious saving of the privileges of rank and establishment. And so far has this system of inculpation been lately carried, that a liberal Journal, of great and increasing celebrity, has actually done us the honour, quarter after quarter, of quoting long passages from our humble pages, in evidence of this sad infirmity in our party and principles.

Now, while we reject of course the epithets which are here applied to us, we admit, at once, the facts on which our adversaries profess to justify them. We acknowledge that we are fairly chargeable with a fear of opposite excesses-a desire to com

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promise and reconcile the claims of all the great parties in the State-an anxiety to temper and qualify whatever may be said in favour of one, with a steady reservation of whatever may be due to the rest. To this sort of trimming, to this inconsistency, to this timidity, we distinctly plead guilty. We plead guilty to a love for the British Constitution-and to all and every one of its branches. We are for King, Lords, and Commons; and though not perhaps exactly in that order, we are proud to have it said that we have a word for each in its turn; and that, in asserting the rights of one, we would not willingly forget those of the others. Our jealousy, we confess, is greatest of those who have the readiest means of persuasion; and we are far more afraid of the encroachments of arbitrary power, under cover of its patronage, and the general love of peace, security, and distinction, which attract so strongly to the region of the Court, than of the usurpations of popular violence. But we are for authority, as well as for freedom. We are for the natural and wholesome influence of wealth and rank, and the veneration which belongs to old institutions, without which no government has ever had either stability or respect, as well as for that vigilance of popular controul, and that supremacy of public opinion, without which none could be long protected from abuse. We know that, when pushed to their ultimate extremes, those principles may be said to be in contradiction. But the escape from inconsistency is secured by the very obvious precaution of stopping short of such exIt was to prevent this, in fact, that the English constitution, and indeed government in general, was established. Every thing that we know that is valuable in the ordinances of men, or admirable in the arrangements of Providence, seems to depend on a compromise, a balance; or, if the expression is thought better, on a conflict and struggle, of opposite and irreconcileable principles. Virtue-society-life itself, and in so far as we can see, the grand movements and whole order of the universe, are maintained only by such a contention.

These, we are afraid, will appear but idle truisms, and shallow pretexts for foolish self-commendation. No one, it will be said, is for any thing but the British constitution; and no body denies that it depends on a balance of opposite principles. The only question is, whether that balance is now rightly adjusted; and whether the Whigs are in the proper course for correcting its obliquities. Now, if the attacks to which we are alluding had been reducible to such a principle as this -if we had been merely accused, by our brethren of the Westminster, for not going far enough on the popular side, and by our brethren of the Quarterly, for going too far-we VOL. XLV, No. 89. C

should have had nothing to complain of beyond what is inseparable from all party contentions; and must have done our best to answer those opposite charges, on their separate and specific merits,-taking advantage, of course, as against each, of the authority of the other, as a proof, a fortiori, of the safety of our own intermediate position. But the peculiarity of our case, and the hardship which alone induces us to complain of it is, that this is not the course that has been lately followed with regard to us, that our adversaries have effected, or rather pretended, an unnatural union against us,-and, deserting not only the old rules of political hostility, but, as it humbly appears to us, their own fundamental principles, have combined to attack us, on the new and distinct ground of our moderation -not because we are opposed to their extreme doctrines respectively, but because we are not extremely opposed to them!

and, affecting a generous indulgence and respect for those who are diametrically against them, seem actually to have agreed to join their arms, to run down those who would mediate between them. We understand very well the feelings which lead to such a course of proceeding; but we are not the less convinced of their injustice,-and, in spite of all that may be said of neutrals in civil war, or interlopers in matrimonial quarrels, we still believe that the peace-makers are blessed,—and that they who seek conscientiously to moderate the pretensions of contending factions, are more likely to be right than either of their opponents.

The natural, and, in our humble judgment, the very important function of a middle party is, not only to be a check, but a bulwark to both those that are more decidedly opposed;and though liable not to be very well looked on by either, it should only be very obnoxious, we should think, to the stronger, or those who are disposed to act on the offensive. To them it naturally enough presents the appearance of an advanced post, that must be carried before the main battle can be joined,—and for the assault of which they have neither the same weapons, the same advantages of position, nor the same motives of action. To the weaker party, however, or those who stand on their defence, it must always be felt to be a protection-though received probably with grudging and ill grace, as a sort of halffaced fellowship, yielded with no cordiality, and ready enough to be withdrawn if separate terms can be made with the adversary. With this scheme of tactics we have long been familiar; and for those feelings we were prepared. But it is rather too much, we think, when those who are irreconcileably hostile, and whose only quarrel with us is, that we go half the length of their hated opponents,-have the face to pretend that we are more hateful than those who go the whole length,—that they

have really no particular quarrel with those who are beyond us, and that we, in fact, and our unhappy mid-way position, are the only obstacles to a cordial union of those whom it is, in truth, our main object to reconcile and unite!

Nothing, we take it, can be so plain as that this is a hollow, and, in truth, very flimsy pretext: and that the real reason of the animosity with which we are honoured by the more eager of the two extreme parties, is, that we afford a covering and shelter to each-impede the assault they are impatient mutually to make on each other, and take away from them the means of that direct onset, by which the sanguine in both hosts imagine they might at once achieve a decisive victory. If there were indeed no belligerents, it is plain enough that there could be no neutrals and no mediators. If there was no natural war between Democracy and Monarchy, no true ground of discord between Tories and Radical Reformers-we admit there would be no vocation for Whigs. The true definition of that party, as matters now stand in England, is, that it is a middle party, between the two extremes of high monarchical principles on the one hand, and extremely popular principles on the other. It holds no peculiar opinions, that we are aware of, on any other points of policy,--and no man of common sense can doubt, and no man of common candour deny, that it differs from each of the other parties on the very grounds on which they differ from each other,--the only distinction being that it does not differ so widely.

Can any thing then be so preposterous as a pretended truce between two belligerents, in order that they may fall jointly upon those who are substantially neutral?-a dallying and coquetting with mortal enemies, for the purpose of gaining a supposed advantage over those who are to a great extent friends? Yet this is the course that has recently been followed, and seems still to be pursued. It is now some time since the thorough Reformers began to make awkward love to the Royalists, by pretending to bewail the obscuration which the Throne had suffered from the usurpations of Parliamentary influence,—the curtailment of the prerogative by a junto of ignoble boroughmongers,-and the thraldom in which the Sovereign was held by those who were truly his creatures. Since that time, the more prevailing tone has been, to sneer at the Whig aristocracy, and to declaim, with all the bitterness of real fear and affected contempt, on the insignificance of men of fortune and talents, who are neither loyal nor popular—and, at the same time, to lose no opportunity of complimenting the Tory possessors of power, for every act of liberality which had been really forced upon them, by those very Whigs whom they refuse to acknowledge as even cooperating in the cause. The

high Tory or Court party have, in substance, played the same game. They have not indeed affected, so barefacedly, an entire sympathy, or very tender regard for their radical allies: but they have acted on the same principle. They have echoed and adopted the absurd fiction of the unpopularity of the Whigs -and, speaking with affected indulgence of the excesses into which a generous love of liberty may occasionally hurry the ignorant and unthinking, have reserved all their severity, unfairness, and intolerance, for the more moderate opponents with whose reasonings they find it more difficult to cope, and whose motives and true position in the country, they are therefore so eager to misrepresent.

Now, though all this may be natural enough in exasperated disputants, who are apt to wreak their vengeance on whatever is most within their reach, it is not the less unfair and unworthy in itself, nor the less shortsighted and ungrateful in the parties who are guilty of it. For we do not hesitate to say, that it is substantially to this calumniated and mutually reviled Whig party, and to those who act on its principles, that the country is truly indebted for its peace and its constitution—and one at least, if not both the extreme parties, for their very existence. If there were no such middle body, who saw faults and merits in both, and could not consent to the unqualified triumph or unqualified extirpation of either-if the whole population of the country was composed of intolerant Tories and fiery reformers -of such spirits in short, to bring the matter to a plain practical bearing, as the two hostile parties have actually chosen, and now support as their leaders and spokesmen, does any man imagine that its peace or its constitution could be maintained for a single year? On such a supposition, it is plain that they must enter immediately on an active, uncompromising, relentless contention; and, after a short defying parley, must, by force or fear, effect the entire subversion of one or the other; and in either case, a complete revolution and dissolution of the present constitution and principle of government. Compromise, upon that supposition, we conceive, must be utterly out of the question; as well as the limitation of the contest to words, either of reasoning or of abuse. They would be at each other's throats before the end of a year! or, if there was any compromise, what could it be, but a compromise on the middle ground of Whiggism?-a virtual conversion of a majority of those very combatants, who are now supposed so to hate and disdain them, to the creed of that moderate and liberal party?

What is it, then, that prevents such a mortal conflict from taking place at the present moment between those who represent themselves as engrossing all the principle and all the force