hé has not necessarily the fragment of a share in giving his consent to it, any more than a Polish boor. He was not born a drunken artisan in a rotten borough, nor the son of one. If he looks round upon the way in which what is taken from him by taxation is disposed of, all he sees is an organization for feeding certain people of certain classes at the expense of the remainder. He might go into parliament, and try to obtain a share of the common plunder; but for this he is too proud. He might stand up for the oppression of the poorer orders as the means of benefiting his own; but for this he is too wise. If he has children, where is he to place them? Commerce is prohibited by act of parliament; he can get them into the list of bankrupts by the expenditure of a small capital as well as of a large one. All the professions are overstocked, in consequence of the same prohibition; there are two curates in embryo for every tithe pig, nine lawyers for every possible brief, and seven doctors to each man rich enough to have the gout. If he looks at his rents, he finds nothing but negative quantities; tenants that cannot pay, coming, like impossible roots, by pairs; his income is an evanescent series, and the method of exhaustion is like to solve all problems in his book. If he turns to his connections, he sees nothing but insolvency; the savings of the father lost by the failure of the sons, and mothers lamenting over it as the act of heaven, without finding out that it was so because the ruling powers would have it so. On looking all round the compass, he sees nothing but one great conspiracy to appropriate and gradually draw off the savings of each man's industry, in support of a plan whose scope and object is to maintain the non-industrious. No man in society can by any exertion of economy sustain his present rank and transmit it to a line of successors with the chance of their sustaining it also, except the lucky few who have a patent for keeping themselves and their descendants at the expense of the community. Men who obtain property by industry are indulged with the power of transmitting it through one or two generations; but there is a process going on, by which, like the grains in a coffee-mill, it must all come to the grinder at last. He who has money does not hold it in fee simple; but by a lease of greater or shorter length, at the end of which it must revert to that portion of the aristocracy which quarters its descendants on the public. In this state of things the marvel is, that the well informed part of the middle classes, and more particularly of the commercial classes, does not arrange itself on the side of the reformers. The commercial classes have a prejudice against what they call politics; derived from the time when commercial men were for the moment gaining largely by the spendthrift

anticipation of the national expenditure, and when any commercial man found opposed to the measures of government was supposed to be so only because he was unable to seize his share. A connection was thus formed between politics and bankruptcy; and the prejudice continues, in spite of the change of circumstances. Nothing can account for the tameness with which commercial men submit to the prohibition of commerce, but this; combined with the operation of the foolish hope, that they shall individually pick something out of the common wreck. As all things have an end, so also must this; and the time cannot be far off, when the middle classes, and those of the highest who are not entered of the plot, will come forward to join their influence to the cause of the starving poor. Commercial misery may be some stimulus, even though it does not amount to the misery of a small loaf. A man may lawfully wish to keep what he has, even though he has not yet an immediate vision of the almshouse. Every body knows what an outcry was made about property, when the object was to establish the supremacy which has led to the present ills. The London Radical Reform Association, is virtually an association for the defence of property. It is an association to prevent all that we have from being taken by our betters. If a manufacturing operative has to preserve himself from maintaining a thousandth part of a scion of the landed aristocracy out of his platter, a man of two thousand a year has to save himself from being saddled with a full-grown imp; and so on in proportion. The time will come when rich and poor will combine to make every man eat out of his own dish; and the actual agent in this cruel operation, will be a radical reform in what is called the commons house of parliament.

The ways in which the middle classes will exert themselves when they come forward, will be the same in which they exert themselves for other objects. They will use the legitimate power they have, to obtain the legitimate power they have not. Instead of fruitless lamentations over the wretched state of the representation, they will use that state, wretched as it is, as a stepping-stone to one that shall be better. If the empire is for sale, they will buy it with a view to repair. They will lay aside all animosities, and combine in their compact all classes where a community of interest can be proved. They will tell the clergy, for example, that whatever may be the opinion of political economists on tithes, it is clear that the working orders of the clergy have nothing to fear from change. To them all change must be for good. In the most unenlightened countries, this truth breaks out. A continental bishop may be an absolutist; but the poor man that was met galloping up Mont Cenis on his mule at sun-set, to save the

soul of a still-born child at the extremity of his parish of thirty miles diameter, was to a certainty a liberal. Even the dignitaries of the English church might find out, that if their revenues are threatened, it is only as a sacrifice to maintain the landlords in the possession of the Corn-laws. Let them look at the question with the advantages their learning and talents give for it; and then let them join with the people in the prosecution of a common interest, or else give up their revenues quietly. Why should not those who fleece the people, fleece a bishop? It is not true that the interests of the church and of the people are divided on the subject. They endure a common danger; and should join for a common deliverance.

The great object of fear to the middle classes, is the apprehended violence and misdirection of those with whom they think they would have to join. They fear the orators who harp upon the bad passions of the people ;-whose idea of the utility of reform is that it would create an ability for carrying on unjust wars, and whose love for liberty displays itself in exciting feelings of hostility against our brethren who have won their battles and our own on the other side of the Atlantic. There is no denying the evil; it is an obstacle the more, but it is an obstacle which, like others, must be got over. Tell them plainly, that we want no more wars for cat-skins;—that if an administration, either royalist or radical, should ever set up a claim to allowing no gun to be fired in Europe without its consent, the middle classes in England would draw off to one side, and leave it to settle the contest by itself. Tell them that if any such administration was to attempt to prescribe what ships should be built in America, the just and natural end would be that England would be put down by a coalition of all civilized states; and that the middle classes will not advance a shilling towards the promotion of such a project. Inform them, that till there is some greater security for good government, the present state of depletion is the happiest of all consummations; and that the man who would voluntarily pay a shilling to remove it, is only comparable to him who having just been bled out of a delirium, should offer a shilling to have his veins re-filled. Give them to understand that their foreign politics are pot-house, and their home ones only make men praise God for Mr. Peel. Tell them that their object is to evade the great question, which is the Corn-laws;-and that their pretence of the necessity for refusing cheap corn in order that men may be able to pay taxes, is as foolish as if a man should refuse an estate lest he should be obliged to pay a property-tax. Say to them that their best and newest plan for seizing on the savings of other men's industry in the funds, is only spoliation wrapped up, that it is

as unjust as if a crew on short allowance were to propose to eke out an accidental relief, by saying to one part of the crew, 'And you, you know, will only be on short allowance as before. Supposing the taxes and the army were reduced to their proper extent, what justice is there in saying that the fundholders shall have no benefit by it, and that it shall be enough for them if they have 30 per cent lopped off to bring them to where they were before? State clearly that the whole argument against the fund-holders, consists in commencing at the year 1812 when restoration began to be made to them, and cutting off all memory of the previous sixteen years that they had been plundered. Say all this boldly and on all opportunities; and the dangerous part of those who call themselves the radicals will soon be reduced to their true value. Set up a sound and honest radicalism, against an unsound and dishonest one. Disown all abuse of existing ministers; and be persuaded, that though it is perfectly necessary that difference of opinion should go all possible lengths, it is true in the main that all ministers do as well as they can. Distrust those who say they see in themselves the signs of heaven-born counsellors, and who believe that the practice of a minister is to be learnt like cutting off a leg. Eschew violence; cultivate education, from A, B, C upwards; hurry nothing,-it will all come in time, like the breaking up of a hard frost. Pull down an abuse where you can; especially where it is one, like that of slavery in the West Indies, whose supporters support all the rest. Go on quietly and perseveringly, and fear nothing. There will be no revolution, no disturbance, no violent changes,-any more than when a child of a span long, turns into a grenadier. Sensible men are not to endure an evil for ever, through a vague fear of its removal being something they have not tried before. Do something; do a little; do more when you can. Keep the stone rolling; and see if you do not end by proving to all ranks and orders, except the downright plunderers, that radical is 'your only wear.'

ART. XIII.-Four Years in Southern Africa. By Cowper Rose, Royal Engineers. London. Colburn. 1829.

MR. ROSE has added an agreeable volume to the many

books of travels we previously possessed on Southern Africa. Our stock of real information will not, indeed, be very greatly augmented by the result of his observations, nor do his reflections upon what he saw in his desultory rambles dip much below the surface; but still his little work possesses both interest and

value sufficient to excite a feeling of respect and kindness for the author, and a desire to communicate such an abstract of its contents as will contribute both to the entertainment and edification of the reader.

The narrative is given in a series of letters; having been condensed, as the writer informs us, from his correspondence with a relative in England during his four years residence. He commences, as usual, at Cape Town, the capital of the colony, with a sketch of the state of society, or rather of the gay society, of that half-way house to India, a topic, as the reader may anticipate, of but little interest or variety, and which has, moreover, been more ably treated by some of his predecessors. We pass on with him, therefore, to Fransche-Hoek, a valley about a day's ride from Cape Town, originally settled by French Protestants, who emigrated thither from Holland, after the Revocation of the edict of Nantz, and who were the first to introduce the cultivation of the vine and other useful arts into the colony.

'The inhabitants,' Mr. Rose observes, are now Dutch in every thing but name; and they speak no French, have no French customs, and not even a religious book in that language is to be found among them; the only distinction I could discover between them and other boors was their greater fondness for psalm-singing, and their aversion to dancing. That it is far easier to retrograde than advance is known; but that these people, settling as they did, remote from the Dutch, should yet have lost every national distinction, surprises me.' -pp. 16, 17.

Our traveller's surprise might have been removed by a little farther inquiry and reflection. The French refugees, from the first but a small body, were settled in the colony upwards of one hundred and forty years ago, in the midst of a Dutch population with which they became speedily and intimately intermixed; and whose language they were under the necessity of employing, not only in all written documents, contracts, law-suits, &c. but also in every mercantile transaction, and on almost every occasion of daily business. It ought, therefore, to occasion little wonder that their descendants of the present day, of whom very few, if any, remain of unmixed Gallic blood, should retain but slight traces of their origin. In point of fact they have long ago been thoroughly amalgamated with the Dutch inhabitants; and so far from being confined to their original settlement in Fransche-Hoek (French Corner) they are now scattered, as we learn from Thompson and other travellers, throughout the remotest districts of the colony; families of Jourdans, Malans, De Plessies, De Villiers, Jouberts, &c. &c. being found even among the back settlers on the Caffer Frontier and Orange River. Passing over Mr. Rose's observations on the character and