verage annual produce of the tax on coffee, for the three years previous to 1808, amounted to 166,000l. In the course of that year, the duty was reduced from 2s. to 7d. the cwt.; and the average annual produce of the reduced duty for the next three years, instead of being diminished, rose to 195,000l.!-showing that the consumption had been increased in a quadruple proportion, and that the comforts of the people had been materially increased.

It is plain, therefore, that a very considerable deduction might be made from some of the most oppressive duties, without occasioning any diminution of the revenue. Nor do we think that it is too much to expect that, although 50 per cent. were deducted from the duties on salt, tea, leather, soap, spirits, beer, French wines, &c., the revenue, instead of being diminished, would be increased. This, however, is a matter of very inferior importance. Whether these anticipations should be realized or not, it is indispensable that Taxation should be diminished. Instead of attempting to raise the revenue to the level of our present unmeasured expenditure, we must reduce our expenditure to the altered circumstances of the country, and make it quadrate with our diminished income. Subsidiary measures for facilitating and encouraging emigration, and for giving every possible freedom to the circulation of labour, might also be advantageously adopted. But it is only from a Reduction of Taxation, and a total Repeal of our barbarous Restraints on the Trade in Corn, that we are to expect adequate and effectual relief. Neither should it be forgotten, that we have now reached a period when it is no longer possible to commit faults with impunity; and, that the longer the work of retrenchment is delayed, the more difficult it will be to restore prosperity to the country.

ART. X. 1. Substance of the Speech of the Right Honourable Lord GRENVILLE in the House of Lords, November 30th, 1819, on the Marquis of Lansdowne's Motion, That a Select Committee be appointed to inquire into the State of the Country, and, more particularly, into the Distresses and Discontents prevalent in the Manufacturing Districts, and the Execution of the Laws with respect to the numerous Meetings which have taken place. pp. 62. Murray, London. 1820.

2. The Substance of the Speech of the Right Honourable W. C. PLUNKET in the House of Commons, on Tuesday, 23d November, 1819. pp. 24. Bancks, Manchester. 1819.

THESE two Speeches have been, for various reasons, and with very different views, extremely praised, both within and

without the walls of the illustrious Assemblies where they were delivered. Lord Grenville's authority is deservedly high, from his great experience of public affairs, long official life, intercourse with many parties in the State, commanding, statesmanlike talents, indefatigable industry, great information, and unimpeached integrity. Mr Plunket's reputation as an orator stands justly among the most exalted of the age; and as he rarely takes part in debates, and hardly ever except upon questions connected with Ireland, the fame of his eloquence has been better preserved than that of almost any speaker in Parliament. To obtain the sanction and the active cooperation of two such persons, on any question, was of great importance to the rash but feeble placemen who now rule this country: But infinitely more valuable was this piece of good fortune, upon an occasion when every friend of Liberty-every man whose judgment was neither warped by ambition, or the less noble failing of impatience for promotion, or bewildered by a momentary alarm, was certain to be found in ardent opposition to the pernicious and slavish policy of the Court. The liberal and enlightened views which have hitherto directed both the eminent individuals in question, and their avowed connexion, both in the sunshine of Court favour, and in the less cheering shades of retirement from office, with the great body of the Whig op→ position, rendered their unfortunate concurrence in the measures of the Government a consummation, perhaps more devoutly to be wished, than readily to be expected. Unhappily for the country, and, we will add, for the future fame of those distinguished personages themselves, this rare felicity was in store for the Ministers, among many other pieces of good fortune not to be expected in the ordinary course of events: The administration which had subdued France, and sent Buonaparte to St Helena, was destined, before its close, to invade the most sacred parts of the Bill of Rights, and begin a censorship of the English Press; and the Cabinet of Messrs Addington and Bragge Bathurst, and Jenkinson and Pole, after marching to Paris, where Mr Pitt and Mr Fox could only send a spy or a flag of truce, have likewise achieved the glory of frighting two of their stoutest and most contemptuous adversaries, at home, into an alliance for the alteration of that Constitution which had survived all the corruptions of the last age, and the violence and delusions and panics of our own disastrous times.

Thus happy in their new confederates, like skilful generals, these placemen turned their forces to the best account, by crying up their value in the most extravagant terms. Lord Grenville's name and weight in the country were perpetually in their

mouths; he was become the chosen champion of the established order of things-the great saviour of the Constitution in Church and State-he who, a few short years before, had been held up, almost as a mark for persecution, certainly as the object for hatred and alarm to every one who regarded the safety of the Hierarchy, and the good of the Protestant religion. Mr Plunket, so lately denounced as a firebrand, and half suspected of being within the statutes of Præmunire for Popish connexions, suddenly became the very oracle to whose decisions, both in policy and law, a final appeal might be made at every stage of the discussion. Men must have something specifick to which they can recur themselves, and refer their followers, in the fervour of general admiration. Accordingly, it suited the purposes of the Government to erect the two Speeches now before us into their authorities and models throughout the argument. Whatever might be urged on the other side, received a short and easy answer Look to the unanswerable Speech of the Noble Baron,' sang the Ministers in the one House.The excellent, the decisive statement of the member for Dublin College,' responded their colleagues in the other.

Far removed as we are from the scenes of those exalted contentions, and reduced to take our information all in by the trusty eye alone, we confess that if we durst so far adventure an ignorant provincial opinion, we should be disposed to marvel at the fame which these two orations have acquired, had we not adverted to the causes of the praise so lavishly bestowed upon them. Nor can we admit the known effects of misreporting to be any solution of the difficulty. Lord Grenville himself publishes his speech. Mr Plunket's, though apparently not corrected by his own hand, is nevertheless admitted to be given with great accuracy. Neither can it now be urged that the most perfect report, one which should convey to us every word as it was spoken, would give an unfavourable view of the effect of oral eloquence, on the ground that, to use Mr Fox's just and admirable remark, speeches are made to be spoken, and not to be read: For, admitting the entire truth of this important saying, it is equally true, that a skilful report of a great speech produces a composition full of high beauties, though not of the highest, and certainly not of the same kind with the merits of spoken oratory. And accordingly, we can admire most cordially those inimitable specimens of masculine, chaste, epigrammatic, vehement eloquence, which Mr Plunket's speeches on the Catholic question present to us, as given in the Parliamentary Debates for 1807 and 1813; and the manly, argumentative, and learned orations of Lord Grenville, upon the same subject,

in the same valuable repository of civil history. But, compared with those productions, the pamphlets now before us are poor and degenerate indeed. Lord Grenville's has none of his close reasoning, his large and liberal views of policy, his honest zeal for suffering humanity, his patriotic resistance to slavish prin-. ciples, his bold, uncompromising contempt for base and cour tierlike devices: While Mr Plunket's presents us only withsuch a plausible argument as some scores of barristers, in either end of the island, could make from a brief upon the late tumults; and is peculiarly defective in the point for which its value was most loudly magnified, a clear or definite statement of the legal views of the subject.

We trust that the great names of these two statesmen will be our excuse, for dwelling somewhat longer upon the matter of their Speeches, and taking notice of a few particulars in each of them, as specimens of the deficiencies of which we have been so hardy as to complain, notwithstanding the chorus of applause with which they are said to have been received by their admiring hearers, reechoed, or perhaps begun, by those whose interest it was to hold them up to admiration. We should premise, that the disappointment is considerably greater in the case of Mr Plunket's than in Lord Grenville's.

That Noble person certainly delivers himself with his accustomed force. Strongly impressed with the truth of what he is stating, his language bears the impress of sincere convictionof conveying the sentiments that come from his heart; and this faithful transcript of cordial feeling, when it proceeds from at man of strong mind, always must produce a high degree of eloquence. Pectus est quod disertum facit.' (QUINTIL.) But, unhappily, he labours, throughout the whole speech, under the influence of a theory, not to say a panic, which seems wholly to paralyze the natural strength of his understanding. He has fancied that the whole frame of society is about to perish by some moral phrensy of the people, or a large portion of the people; and though he thinks that it may survive the struggle, yet he considers the damage it must undergo in the conflict, to be such as make it likely that a wreck only will be saved. Through so distorting a medium he views every part of the subject, and all that bears any relation to it. Truths which on every other occasion he would have admitted as self-evident, he now overlooks, or passes by as doubtful, or recoils from as pe rilous. Evils in our system of polity, which his profound knowledge of economics must long ago have taught him to regard as incalculably ruinous to the State, he underrates, or palliates, or is willing to bear with, in the dread of encountering:

some other hazards that have taken hold of his affrighted imagination. Remedies, of which himself has heretofore been the patron, in some instances, and which, in all cases, flow clearly from principles known to be congenial to his philosophy, he now unhappily views with suspicion, and turns from, wildly staring to see if any plot or stratagem lurks beneath them. His alarm all this while impels him onward, so that he cannot look steadily around him. Pedibus timor addidit alas.' It whets his ingenuity, however, and sometimes conjures up theories from afar, to confirm his apprehensions; sometimes haunts him with phantoms of unreal things, with which he deals as if they were in actual existence. The sight is at once painful and humiliating; nor could any thing but a sense of duty, in a most important emergency, force us to linger over it. Nay, such is our unfeigned respect for the powerful understanding in which it has made such havock, that we should doubt whether the delusion were not ours, not his,-if we had not, to convince us, the unerring evidence of facts, even since the sentiments before us were promulgated.

6

The mischief,' says Lord Grenville,' against which we are now called upon to defend our country, is not merely of the present day; no, nor of the present year.' He then traces it to 1795; and even that is not a sufficiently remote origin. He goes back to the beginning of the French Revolution; but this won't satisfy him; and he cites Mr Burke's authority, consigned to posterity in his immortal writings,' to show how that terrible convulsion of the world' did not create, but only called forth the evil-increased it, and gave fresh vigour to its operation.' Without stopping to ask how far this doctrine is to carry us; how long ago it is since we ought in common prudence to have abandoned our free constitution, and sacrificed our liberties to our tranquillity; or how little of that freedom it can ever be safe for us at any time to enjoy-let us, with every veneration for Mr Burke's great talents, his learning and eloquence, honestly express a doubt of the soundness of that judgment, which on this subject would erect him into an authority, and draw from his extravagant theories, and the visions of his most overheated imagination, oracular maxims to guide our conduct in the practical administration of public affairs. Such appeals have been but too frequent among those who were naturally dazzled with the splendour of his rhetoric, and edified by the copious stores of his knowledge. But to hold him up as a prophet, as one who foresaw what has happened, further than to form a very vague and obscure idea of the beginning of the Revolution-a prediction possibly fulfilled by the measures to