HOPE ONLY IN THE REFORMERS. 419 themselves, as the pent up forces of nature find relief in the fires of volcanoes and the tread of earthquakes. The Reform party in England mean a temperance reform, as one of the chief objects which they are trying to accomplish. They will bring this reform about, if achieved at all, in precisely the same manner-in fact, in the only way in which any reform in England can be wrought which depends upon the action of the National Legislature. To that Parliament they are going; there they have appealed their cause. If the demands they make are not conceded, they will go back to the people, and call for a New Reform Bill, which will, by doubling the number of electors, revolutionize the representation in Parliament, and overwhelming majorities be secured, not only for these concessions which might now be gracefully and safely granted, but the longer their prayer is denied, the broader will be the claims they will clamor for; and when they are conceded, it will be at a terrible expense to the privileged. classes, who have so long stood between the British people and the rights with which men are clothed by their Creator. this case, as in all others, then, we may safely repeat, that the hopes of England in the future all centre upon the Reformers. Without their exertions the Empire will be dismembered. Its parts will lose their cohesion, and their hold will be broken up; not as Rome became dissevered by her distant colonies lapsing into independence, but by a bloody and terrible revolution, which will turn millions of enraged, ignorant, savage men, driven to madness by their wrongs and sufferings, to exhaust all their force and fury upon the aristocracy and the privileged classes. In CLIVE walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself. * Giving up to English rapacity a helpless and timid race, who knew not where lay the Island which sent forth their oppressors, and whose complaints had little chance of being heard across fifteen thousand miles of ocean.-Macaulay. At present it is only in the East Indies that Slavery exists under British rule. There, not only the laborers are slaves, but the great mass of the population are serfs, completely under the sway of the East India Company, to be ground down by the "land rents exactions, at its will. -O'Connell's Speech at the World's Convention. THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN INDIA, AND THE COLONIES. I. E now turn our eyes away to far-off India, and her two hundred million subjects of England. No survey of the British Empire, however brief, can omit some account of the origin and growth of the late East India Company, which has no parallel in human history, either in the extent of its sway, or the magnitude of its crimes. Macaulay, who comprehended this subject better than any of his countrymen, sweeps the whole field in a few dashes of his vigorous pen. In speaking of Lord Clive, the founder of the British Empire in India, he says: "His matchless genius in war and in policy gave to England the magnificent inheritance of the house of Tamerlane. On his arrival in India, whither he was sent as a clerk, to make a fortune or die of a fever, he found a trading company, possessing only a few acres for purposes of commerce, which in less than a hundred years spread its empire from Cape Comorin to the Eternal Snow of the Himalayas; compelled Mahratta and Mahommedan to forget their mutual feuds in common subjection; tamed down those wild races which had resisted the most powerful of the Moguls; and having united under its laws a hundred millions of subjects, carried its victorious arms far to the east of the Burrampooter, and far to the west of the Hydaspes; dictated terms of peace at the gates of Ava, and seated its vassal on the throne of Candahar." Such is the field over which we are to glance. BY II. Y virtue of an Act of Parliament, on the 2d of August, 1858, the East India Company was abolished: "All the territories heretofore under the government of the East India Com |