pense of national wealth, worth, and morality: this trade, which soon destroys the healthy capital of a nation, is but a "gilded halo hovering round decay," and to this we think that a mere commercial and democratic supremacy would inevitably lead us. How far the mere spirit of trade will lead men independently even of the pressure of national want, is amply proved by the humiliations the Genoese and Venetians submitted to from the Turks, for the sake of the early Levant trade, as well as by the degradations by which the Dutch purchased the paltry advantage of sending an annual ship to Japan. What this country and its people were in less commercial times, may also be mentioned for the information of the upholders of trade to the exclusion of every other interest. All the historians of the middle ages agree in stating, that the English were by far the most beautiful race of people in Europe; and it may be fairly doubted, whether great national beauty can be separated from national comfort and happiness: they were also confessedly the most active, athletic, and warlike people, that is, they possessed in the highest degree, all the virtues of those times, and they were further the conquerors of France, and their country was termed " merry England." In our commercial age, thanks to tacticians, liberal and political economists, the conquest of France was found no such easy matter, and the term of" merry England" is remembered only by the singular contrast it suggests to commercial England. That our people still retain many of their personal qualities is true, but no one can visit any of the great manufacturing towns or districts, without perceiving how much they are already on the decline. Commerce, more unsteady than the southern gale," has brought us wealth, certainly; it also forwarded, as it always does, the early stages of our civilization; but it has also brought us many evils: whether it has brought us a counterbalancing quantity of virtue, is the question its upholders have to answer before they can demand further powers, certain of extending its already wide-spread influence. There is a point of yet lingering national character, that renders any great change in this country exceedingly precarious. We are, of all the people of the earth, the most obedient to the laws to which we know that submission is due: but we acknowledge no superior but that law, and the moment any other is attempted, even with a good intent, John Bull at once assumes his pugilistic attitude, and becomes the "free-born Englishman," the most intractable and insubordinate of all God's creatures. This noble spirit of independence fits men for the conquest of the world, but makes them very dangerous tools for political experiments. They are submissive to the laws that have been handed down to them from their forefathers, because they know that universal obedience is due and paid to such laws. Once freed, however, from those moral bonds, who shall bring the giant, intoxicated with power, back within the bounds of social discipline? Who shall convince him of the necessity of a new order of things he may not like? And whence shall come the power of enforcing obedience? As a matter of abstract right, none will deny that all who pay taxes are entitled to be fairly represented-but as soon as representation becomes power, as in the case of electing the governing branch of the legislature, then the thing is widely altered: for the community have then a right to demand security from all who exercise such power and trust, and therefore insist on the security of property, till the better guarantee REFORM. of character is established. And exactly in proportion as the powers of the elected increase, and it now constitutes the supreme power of the country, so does the responsibility of the Elector also rise, and in the same increasing proportion should security be demanded of him for the exercise of that power. In private life, no man trusts his fate and fortune to an unknown individual without ample security; it seems, but in public life, when the fortunes of all are at stake, we are, Many think, indeed, that the to follow a different line of conduct. Bill cannot possess the democratic tendency we ascribe to it, because the able and upright men who brought it forward would be the very To say nothing last to seal the doom of their order by such a measure. here of the strange project of diminishing the number of English members and increasing those of the sister Isle, at the very time when Ireland was almost in a state of rebellion, and when the dignity of the House was suffering from the conduct of some of the Irish members within its walls; we need only point to the results brought out by common arithmetic, and fully verified by the late election. And those who trust to mere men in such matters, forget, or know not, the effects that years of strife and opposition will produce on the minds of the wisest and the best. Reform has been a party question during the whole of the political lives of its present supporters; loudly cheered by one party, and fiercely assailed by the other, they have grown grey in fighting its battles with zealous consistency, and it is the natural tendency of a contest so carried on to raise and fire the imagination, and to hurry ardent men far beyond the bounds that sober judgment would prescribe. Before endangering, in these times of excitement, the very foundation of social order, in the idle hope of bettering the condition of the people, by what we are pleased to term a reformed system of government, let us first try what can be effected by self-reform, and give our ancient laws and institutions a just trial; for no political institutions, however perfect, can lead to beneficial results unless virtuously acted up to. Let us therefore cast liberalism, radicalism, exclusiveness, and tinsel-hunting to the dogs: let us in every sense of the word, return to our country, to British feelings, and if it must be, even to British prejudices. Let the name of a Briton be a passport to British sympathy instead of British hauteur: let us aid each other in sorrow and in suffering, and cheer each other in prosperity: and let all ranks take a pride in aiding to forward and uphold the honour and happiness of their native land. When this reform shall have been carried, a reform in our political institutions may be safely and easily undertaken; and it will then probably be found, that they require no such sweeping change as that proposed by Lord John Russell's Bill. 66 one At the breaking out of the Irish rebellion, several fencible regiments, composed of the finest men, perhaps, that ever carried arms, were raised at the mere beck of the great proprietors of Sutherland, Caithness, and Ross. Those once populous districts are now sheep-walk waste and wide;" sheep have displaced the men, who have been forced to emigrate, or to seek employment in the sickly and demoralising manufactories of Glasgow, Paisley, &c. &c. A few landlords have been enriched, and political economists and empirics have boasted of the improvement of the country, at the very moment when This system, they were laying the axe to the root of its prosperity. * which began in England and swept over. Scotland, is now proceeding in Ireland: that it tells more against the aristocracy than the democracy is true, and, therefore, is it here mentioned. We formerly stated, that, " bating what is effected by fashion, the tendency of which is at present decidedly hostile to all manly and patriotic feeling, the aristocracy of England contain within themselves more of the elements of real greatness, than are to be found in any other class of equal numbers in any country in the world;" and though we still adhere to that opinion, we neverthless think that their general conduct has greatly tended to bring about the present crisis. They, too, were influenced by the spirit of commercial times, bent the knee to mammon, set an example of subserviency to power and riches, that was so promptly imitated by all ranks, that no man could in the end stand upright in the presence of his superior in fortune, and the relative wealth of the community might almost have been ascertained by angular measurement. Instead of upholding national manners and feelings, they became Liberals, resided and spent vast sums in France and Italy; trained up their sons and daughters in the anti-British ideas, so carefully instilled into all youthful minds in the virtuous convents and seminaries of those moral countries. Not only affable, but often cringing abroad to the most despicable of foreigners, they were at home cold, haughty, and distant, to their countrymen, seeking in exclusiveness the most wretched of all distinctions, because the easiest to be attained, and never sought by those who have other means of attaining honest celebrity. The matrons of England too, whose fame once stood so high, that fifteen years of peace and slander have not been altogether able to shake it, might every night be seen at Roman conversazioni, associating on the most friendly terms with the married women of Italy, whose conduct is not attempted to be disguised: whilst the young ladies of England studied gallantry in those French and Italian coteries, in which the young and the unmarried native women are very properly never allowed to appear. As it is not given to all to grasp the full grandeur of British institutions, and to understand the manners naturally resulting from them, many of our travellers-for in all these matters the aristocracy of wealth were but the paltry imitators of the aristocracy of birth-captivated by the fripperies of foreign manners, as more congenial to little minds, tried to import and naturalise such exotics amongst us; and thus broke the last link that still connected them with the lower orders, who unwillingly granted even a constitutional power to those who no longer shared in the national feelings of the people for whom they attempted to legislate. That for such conduct the aristocracy can make no better claim than the mercantile interest for an extra-constitutional share of power, is sufficiently evident; and if they have acquired any such power, beyond what the time-serving spirit of the age will always enable wealth to command, let restitution be demanded in a tone that shall ensure compliance; but let us not, on that account, overthrow the balance of the constitution; let us not rush into wild democracy in order to escape from aristocratic influence. Let us have reform, not founded, indeed, on the theories of Radicals, who would make us believe that kings, * P. 302, No. 28, March 1831. REFORM. lords, and laws, are the only bars to the perfectibility of man, and the immediate arrival of the millennium, but a reform that shall leave us the constitution of King, Lords, and Commons, unimpaired. And a very slight alteration in the representation will be sufficient to effect this; for the last election has triumphantly proved that self-reform is, after all, the reform principally wanted. The opposition press even carried hollow every point it took up against the Wellington Administration, and some of those points were verily not of the wisest. We have taken up this subject with regret, and in sorrow and with bitter forebodings do we close it; for, speaking from professional feelings, perhaps, we must say, that nothing has struck us as so sad a sign of these evil times, as the lamentable facility with which public men have been driven from the discharge of their duty by mob clamour and newspaper abuse. "Ω πέπονες, τάχα δή τι κακὸν ποιήσετε μεῖζον Τῇδε μεθημοσύνη ἀλλ ̓ ἐν φρεσὶ θέσθε ἕκαστος Αἰδῶ καὶ νέμεσιν· δὴ γὰρ μέγα νεῖκος ἔρωρεν.—Iliad Lib. xiii. A conscientious change of opinions we can easily understand, but to retain opinions honestly formed, and yet to retire, brow-beaten, from a contest on which the fate of England depends, is to us a fearful and In such a cause incomprehensible novelty in the character of Britons. as the present, it is the duty of all who fight from conviction, to fight to the last, for submission but emboldens the foe,-and to yield, because the battle seems hopeless, is a craven weakness that has lost many a fair field that firmness might have retrieved. It is the last fight for the proudest mental fabric that ever adorned the earth, or helped to enlighten mankind. The eyes of the world are on the combatants, and as the defenders of our time-honoured institutions neglect or perform their duty, so will the present and the future scorn or laud their names. There was no want of despondency in the army towards the evening of the battle-day of Waterloo. The Dutch and Belgians had been scattered "like chaff before the wind of heaven;" masses of hostile infantry, like dark and overcharged clouds, seemed ready to burst in thunder over the remnant of the British band, who, forced into squares by the overwhelming superiority of the French cavalry that everywhere swept the plain, presented almost infallible marks to the iron hail that hundreds of pieces of artillery were pouring in upon them if in such extremity, when hope seemed none, and when death had for hours strode triumphantly through their thinned and bleeding ranks, not a single soldier, of the humblest name and station, left his post; shall it be said that the high and the noble of the land shrunk from their duty, when the constitution of their country was to be upheld; shall those who carried their heads so high on the mere strength of the physical courage displayed by sailors and soldiers, be in the hour of trial found totally wanting in the higher quality of moral courage? Perish the thought! and if we too must fall; if the constitution of these realms is to sink in the universal tempest that is now sweeping over Europe, let its sworn defenders behave at least in a manner worthy the cause confided to them, and go down with the flag of duty and of honour nailed to the mast-head. LETTERS FROM CONSTANTINOPLE. NO. I. AMONG the recent improvements that have taken place in the Turkish Empire, there is none that marks so strongly the approximation of the people to European habits and feelings, as their entertaining an idea of establishing a Quarantine against the infection of plague. As this circumstance forms a momentous era in their history, and the subject seems peculiarly appropriate to the Naval Department of the United Service Journal, I shall confine myself in this communication to a description of the intended establishment, with the incidents which have led to its proposed adoption. It will, in all probability, be the first notice of it published in Europe. The strong and extravagant notions of predestination entertained by the Turks, have hitherto been carried so far, that they deemed it an impiety to take any precaution against whatever Allah was pleased to send. Till very lately, they rejected vaccination on this principle; but a Frank physician having persuaded them that it was not a prophylactic, but a therapeutic, not intended to prevent a disease, but to heal one already existing in the human constitution, they were satisfied with the distinction, and when the Sultan had some of his children vaccinated, many others followed his example. After the awful visitation of the plague in 1812, they could not be persuaded to take any measures of safety, though they saw that the Franks, who shut themselves up from contact or communication, generally escaped amidst the carnage that surrounded them, nor was it till 1000 persons a day were brought out of the top Kakousi gate to be buried, that they would suffer even prayers to be offered up in the Mosques that the plague might be stayed, deeming even that a murmuring and a want of due submission to the decrees of Providence. Some years after, however, the disease again appeared among the Pashaw's troops encamped at Buyukdére, and the Turkish soldiers were for the first time observed washing the clothes of their deceased companions, and hanging them to dry outside their tents. Many a Frank was greatly alarmed, when passing by he incautiously came in contact with these infected articles, notwithstanding the depuration of air and water, which he could hardly believe the Turks would ever attempt. But it was after the late Russian campaign, that they began seriously to consider the absurdity of their opinions. They saw the ravages the plague made in Wallachia, and the effectual precautions taken by their enemies, which, in many instances, arrested its progress and finally subdued it; and as they adopted their military discipline, they also thought of profiting by their example in other respects. An energetic Pasha seeing the plague break out in his district, drew a cordon round the village where it appeared, and suffered no one to pass either in or out on any pretext. After some time, every thing was silent, and on examination, it was found that the whole of the population was dead, but the disease never extended beyond the spot where this fearful |