in the opening of the extraordinary harangue we have quoted, stated

'Since the acts of Lord Palmerston have been more completely developed, I have seen circumstances which point directly at treason. I must confess that when I first became acquainted with Mr. Urquhart— having been led to regard him as an Ultra-Tory-I entertained some distrust of his intentions. I thought he might have had a private quarrel with Lord Palmerston-that Lord Palmerston had been the cause of his dismissal from a high office—and I could not help having a suspicion that Mr. Urquhart had been influenced by a private and improper resentment. But when I came to talk confidentially to him, and to read his writings with that attention which, from their great talent, as well as the importance of the subject itself, was due to them, my opinion changed; and I am bound to tell you that I consider Mr. Urquhart not only one of the most honest, but one of the ablest of men.'-p. 33.

Mr. Attwood's encomium on this new political leader was still more extravagant: we select a few passages of his harangue at Carlisle :

'Let me now gratify myself by naming that great man whose follower I am proud to call myself. We owe the knowledge, indispensable to safety, to the genius of Mr. Urquhart. . . . . . I have found in this man that which I have found in none besides-a capacity of intellect and purity of virtue, in which he stands alone amidst the present generation of mankind. I therefore, and not I alone, regard him as a man whose mission it is to save, and what is more, to renovate his country. We regard him with a confidence and veneration as a leader, for the success of whose sublime and holy aims we would willingly jeopardise every future prospect of personal advantage; sacrifice every scheme of private happiness, every consideration of fortune, and even life.... (Cheers.) .. I tell you of a man-and hereafter judge me if I tell you so untruly—I speak to you, I say, of a man who has not his equal amongst living men! .. I am willing to pledge my existence for the truth of all the views I have derived from him, who seems to me to have been sent to realise bright visions of despairing patriotism, for years indulged in vain; of one who is to be our country's saviour!' (Applause.)—Ib. pp. 14, 15.

Risum teneatis!-but, alas! 'tis no matter for mirth-the ambassadors of this great man,' this saviour of England,' created by Lord Palmerston-like a Frankenstein, out of nothing, to be his persecutor and plague-his ambassadors, we say, did actually proceed to Paris with those and similar resolutions, which would be treason if they were not nonsense, and there were entertained at a public dinner of thirteen persons, at which M. Odillon Barrot, the leader (after M.Thiers) of the French radical party, presided. Some respectable persons of that party who were said to have attended, publicly denied their concurrence; and we believe that the

embassy

embassy was appreciated at its true value, and produced as little sensation at Paris as the previous proceedings had done in England: but if the result exhibited the personal insignificance of Mr. Urquhart and his sect, it has not the less proved both the extreme impropriety and folly of Lord Palmerston in having been the original fountain of the mischief, and-which is of much more serious importance-the morbid, the treasonable disposition of that portion of the public mind which could for a moment countenance and concur in such extravagances. Who can answer for the internal or international tranquillity of countries in the relative position of France and England if such meetings as those at Carlisle and Newcastle are to be tolerated, and that the Attwoods, the Cardos, and the Doubledays are to be the self-constituted internuncios of nations? Lord Palmerston may in his private character despise such calumnies, but the Secretary of State, responsible for good order at home and for the national character abroad, ought not to truckle to such agitators or rather the ministry to which he belongs ought not to have placed itself in so abject a dependence on the mob, that they dare not resent, nor even notice, such outrages on decency, on law, and on truth-on private character, and on national honour. So false is it, that il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte, -a proverb made by a people without consciences. The Roman poet was a better moralist: the first step of dastardly compliance is but too easy; it is the return to a higher air that is difficult.

We now arrive at the consideration of the serious events with which these impertinent obscurities of Newcastle and Carlisle -gnats on the chariot-wheels of Europe-have presumed to mix themselves-the troubles in the Levant. The question, to be understood, must be taken from its origin. Before we can apply the principles of international law to the case, we must see who Mehemet Ali is, and what he wants, and why his pretensions have the effect of agitating the world.

Mehemet Ali was born in 1769, of obscure-we might say, unknown parentage, at Cavalla, a town in Roumelia, at the head of the Egean, and therefore a subject of the Porte. Taken into the family of the governor of the town, he showed talents and address, acquired favour, made a good marriage, and established himself-we almost hesitate to say whence sprang the fortunes of this person, who is made the cause or the pretence of so great and fearful a crisis-he established himself as a tobacconist, by which he made, we are told, a large and rapid fortune. notice the humble beginning of Mehemet, because, though it raises his personal character, it very much weakens his political pretensions.

pretensions. It is one thing to maintain and extend an ancient and substantial power which has roots in the country, but it is quite another to endeavour to bolster up a temporary authority, which, as from nothing it sprang, will probably return to nothing. On Buonaparte's invasion of Egypt, Mehemet Ali was abstracted from his commercial occupations, and became second in command of the contingents which his native town sent to the Ottoman army. The first was the governor's son, who, soon sickening of the climate of Egypt and probably of the conflict with the French, left the Cavalliote force in the hands of Mehemet; who speedily distinguished himself in the arts both of war and of peace; and, on the expulsion of the French, acquired a substantive authority in the country to which he had so lately come a subordinate adventurer. Those who have not read the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, or who read them only as the fables of Scheherezade, and not as what they are-an accurate picture of Eastern manners,-can hardly comprehend the sudden elevations of Oriental life, whether under the Shahs, the Caliphs, or the Porte. But so it is;-and Mehemet Ali soon became so important and so formidable in Egypt, that the Porte thought it prudent to remove him thence, by what seemed the immense favour of promoting him to the Pachalik of Salonike, in his native province. We need not detail the various arts of fraud and force by which Mehemet evaded this invidious advancement, but, after a long struggle, the nominal Pacha of Salonike was reluctantly recognised by the Porte as its Pacha of Egypt. He held, however, a divided authority with the Mamelukes, an extraordinary class-we cannot call them race-of whom Mehemet determined to disembarrass himself; and in whose extinction, had it been operated by less atrocious means, humanity would have rejoiced. But it was no moral feeling that determined Mehemet to extirpate the Mameluke dynasty: their destruction was the deep and cold-blooded calculation of his insatiable ambition; and he accomplished it by one of the most treacherous and execrable massacres that pollute the annals of even Eastern atrocity. In all history, ancient or modern, we do not recollect any single instance of so wholesale, and, in its personal circumstances, so detestable a murder as this, by which Mehemet Ali finally and completely usurped into his own hands the government of Egypt. He still, however, professed himself a vassal of the Porte, paid his tribute, and was not unwilling to serve the Sultan-but rather as a military auxiliary than as a tributary vassal-in enterprises which flattered his ambition or might tend to consolidate his power. He was first employed against the Wahabees, a religious sect which had seized upon the city of Mecca, and whom the

Porte

Porte regarded in the doubly odious light of heretics and rebels. The war was tedious; Mehemet's desire to finish it was long doubtful; but at last his celebrated son Ibrahim Pacha, who then laid the foundation of his military reputation, defeated the enemy in the field, took their towns, and effectually subdued the military insurrection-though it is said that the religious heresy still exists and waits but a favourable opportunity for breaking out anew. Next came the disturbances in Greece, and Mehemet Ali-obedient to the Porte whenever some work of blood and destruction was to be done, and then onlysent a large and powerful army into the Morea, again under Ibrahim, where they maintained for nearly seven years a series of desultory, but destructive, hostilities, in which, though Ibrahim increased his personal fame, no great or honourable feats of legitimate war are to be traced, and the chief trophies were the burning of towns, the destruction of harvests, and the slaughter of women and children. In short, Ibrahim rendered himself the terror and the scourge of Greece, and would probably have become its master, had not the European powers-coming to a resolution to arrest that bloody and bootless system of hostility— forced Mehemet Ali to recall his army, and established that puny and ridiculous anomaly called the Kingdom of Greece. Mehemet Ali, a kind of Buonaparte in his own way, was now embarrassed what to do with his army, which was so disproportionate to anything else but his ambition, that it reached at one time, we are informed, to 80,000 men: but the island of Candia, stirred up by the example of Greece, having made some efforts at independence, Mehemet undertook to reduce the insurgents: the European powers, however,-particularly England and France,—again intervened to prevent further bloodshed: under their mediation an arrangement was effected, and the Egyptian troops again returned home; where Mehemet, not knowing how else to employ them, undertook a war of conquest into the regions of the Upper Nile, where he met with considerable losses, and was finally obliged to

retreat.

During all these events the Pacha himself remained in Egypt: and there the exigencies of his position and his own natural shrewdness directed him to the policy-which, indeed, all usurpers, in all times and countries, have adopted-of making himself popular, both with his subjects and with foreign powers; and of strengthening his vicarious authority by the introduction of European arts, a seeming adoption of European ideas, and a cunning flattery of individual travellers or visitors whom he thought likely to direct the current of European opinion in his favour. He imported steam-engines, talked of railroads, affected

to

to adopt Adam Smith's principles of trade; and protected the conveyance of mails: he invited civil engineers from Birmingham, and military engineers from Paris; he flattered the French by giving them the Luxor obelisque, which they have erected with great pride and expense in the principal Place of their metropolis, and he offered Cleopatra's Needle to the English, which we, with more pride, or perhaps, to say the truth, with more economy, thought proper to decline. In short, the old tobacco-merchant-the persecutor of the Wahabees-the murderer of the Mamelukes-the desolater of Greece-the mighty Nimrod of the Chasse aux Negres-one of the most ruthless despots that ever trampled on the besotted and doomed population of Egypt, became by degrees an Augustus, an Alfred—a patron of arts and sciences-a political economist-a day-star of civil and religious liberty, rising in the East to enlighten mankind, and to revive, with all the additional grace and force of modern civilization, the ancient empire of Sesostris from the Nile to the Tanais.

Early in 1832 the Pacha, either not knowing how to employ an army so disproportionate to the nature of his position, or stimulated by the success of the revolutionary movements in Europe, thought it a favourable moment to make war upon the sovereign whom he had so lately served, and whose vassal he still professed to be. Mr. Kinnear, a recent traveller, and, like most travellers, a little biassed in favour of Mehemet, but a sensible, and on the whole a fair witness, thus states the pretence of this rebellion::

"The weakness of the Pachas of Syria, and the supineness of the government at Constantinople, were sufficiently favourable for the designs of Mehemet Ali; but additional circumstances arose, which enabled him to put in execution his project of seizing on the sovereignty of Syria. A number of Jannisaries had taken refuge in the cities of Damascus and Aleppo; and when it was known that Mehemet Selim, the Grand Vizier, who had been so actively instrumental in the destruction of their body, had been appointed to the pachalic of Damascus, Mehemet Ali found ready and powerful adherents, not only in the proscribed Jannisaries, but in the fanatic populace and their leaders, who regarded them as martyrs to the cause of religion. The new Pacha was massacred amid the popular tumult which arose on his arrival at Damascus; and Mehemet Ali, taking advantage of the excitement in Syria, and the supineness of the government at Constantinople, marched a large body of Bedawee cavalry across the Desert from Egypt, and invested Acre.

A personal quarrel with Abdallah, Pacha of Acre, was the publiclyavowed pretext for this invasion; but there can be no doubt that it was but the first step towards the accomplishment of a long-meditated design to seize on the government of Syria.'-Kinnear, pp. 317, 318.

Acre, thus invested by the Bedaweens, and attacked by a fleet

under