ment of labouring to introduce a military despotism. This effect, in contributing to render public meetings more controllable by the civil power, will tend to diminish the necessity of military interference. The opponents of Government, when it suits their purpose, affect boundless humanity in the cry of "Prevention is better than cure." To themselves they would monopolize the credit of prospective compassion; will they now, then, support a bill which must contribute to dispense with that interference they so often profess to abhor? Not they, forsooth; yet these are the men who have the effrontery to stand forth in their prominence of inability, as candidates for the reins of the Empire-men unable or unwilling to hail a principle they profess to adore, awaiting developement in the operation of a measure they most strenuously oppose.

To proceed: Let us examine the necessary results of the amendment they patched up to localize the bill they so unsuccessfully decried. Make the bill local, and from an extirpator it will become a propagator of contagion. Sedulous and serious in their designs as the Jacobins evince themselves, I

defy refutation when I assert, that by moving upon places exempt from the operation of the bill, because but partially infected, they would propagate the moral plague till it tainted every hamlet in the kingdom. Did distress alone predispose to infection, it might be otherwise; but lamentable experience teaches that human depravity is eager to inhale the first breath of the mental blight. A local bill, therefore, would be a weapon in the hands of the enemy it was intended to combat.

The clause which, in making it a misdemeanor for strangers to attend any meeting, is improved and made explicit by the addition of the words "knowingly and purposely for ob jects contrary to law;" gives ample protection to those who, through ignorance or accident, may be present; and, in fact, points its operation, as exclusively intended, against itinerant orators and their strolling banditti.

The clause which gives every man who has a right to attend any meeting, the optional power of a special constable in that meeting, is another most constitutional provision. This clause is a further unanswerable contradiction to those

who accuse Government of wishing and attempting to rule by the sword. Disaffected fellow-parishioners can no longer bring down military execution on their own heads and those of others, by cutting off and waylaying the supplies of the civil power, and stoning those who venture to come forward to be sworn in as special constables. The mere right of attending any public meeting now constitutes the possessor of that right a special constable, wherever that right may be exercised.

Their opposition to this bill has so heightened my contempt for the intellect of the degenerate Whigs, that I would much sooner see an honest farmer, with an ordinary degree of sagacity, at the helm of Government, than such shallow, shuffling, self-contradicting politicians. With these ideas, I am not at all surprised to see a mischievous Baronet thrust forward to defend the harmlessness of inflammatory symbols and mottos-those hieroglyphs of assassination and massacre-those tongues whose treason is as audible as it is unbridled, and which, in dumb shew, hold up to imitation the bloody tragedy of the French Revolution.

Though the Marquis of Lansdown can conceive a jury of Englishmen diverted from the due performance of their duty into an unequal distribution of that justice which it is their pride and their glory to render impartial, yet I am bold to vindicate them by declaring, that neither the station," nor though he please to add "the character" of any delinquent he may choose to applaud, would put a veto on his exportation from the land, should he dare consummate a crime worthy of such a reward. "Liberty or death" is a Briton's creed; but when we see it profaned by association with "bloody daggers," "death's heads and bones," and blasphemous appropriations of Scripture to bid even the beggar strip the shirt off his back to procure implements of massacre, then no mischievous Baronet shall wheedle us into a belief that their original and genuine meanings are not perverted for the most terrific purposes. The foregoing sentence shall be his gibbet, and on it shall posterity behold the character of one of the chief disturbers of his day, in hideous and everlasting exposure.

JULIUS.

SIR,

LETTER IX.

TO THE SAME.

December 27, 1819.

As a preface to the discussion of the last of the five bills now pending in Parliament, I think I cannot do better than register two opinions respecting its results, as diametrically opposite to each other as opinions can well be. That learned law-officer, the Solicitor General, distinctly asserts, that the effect of the Seditious and Blasphemous Libels Bill will answer the intent for which it was framed, viz. to banish from the press that low, illegitimate brood, which has polluted its privileges, and thereby endangered its liberty. The Times-serving Journal protests, that should this bill pass into law, "it will drive away all men of liberal habits and education from the press, and leave, as its exclusive supporters, the low, the vile, the profligate, and the desperate." My object in putting this contrast of prediction upon record. is, to attach lasting disgrace to that infa