"Be ye therefore ready also, for the Son of Man cometh at an hour when ye think not."-pp. 599, 600. Thus terminated the active and diversified career of Sir Stamford Raffles, marked more by cloud and sunshine, considering the comparatively limited sphere of his exertions, than, perhaps, any other on record. Several of his official papers are given in the Appendix, and also a catalogue of the specimens which he presented to the Zoological Society. ART. II.—The Resources of the United Kingdom: or the Present Distresses Considered, their Causes pointed out, and an Outline of a Plan for the Establishment of a National Currency that would have a fixed value, proposed. By W. R. A. Pettyman. London: J. Ridgway. 1830. It is impossible to cast the most cursory glance over our domestic history, without being struck by the evils which have originated in our spirit of party, and, accordingly, numerous writers have not failed to point out the advantages that would result from its extinction. Eminent among these, Bolingbroke,-equally the rival of Ulysses, in his plastic mind and in his storm-tossed life,-made an effort to rescue his companions from their Circean bondage; but his biography informs us that, like his predecessor, he was enslaved by the enchantress whom he attempted to disarm; and was among the most illustrious, but most intoxicated, of her spell-bound captives. Hume, too, peeping, from his tub in the north, with cynical contempt on the operations of his southern neighbours, employed himself with classifying the symptoms of our national plague, and with lashing the follies, whose wild transports he was too passionless to experience. Great is the disadvantage of risking a comparison with these illustrious names; and diffidence might suggest that where Hume and Bolingbroke had failed, success could hardly be expected from any similar attempt. Yet, as the effect of a cannon-ball depends not only on its own weight, and on the skill with which it is directed, but also on the medium through which it has to pass, and on the nature of what it assaults, so does the success of an opinion depend, not only on the talent with which it is propounded, but on the prejudice which it has to encounter in its passage, and on the disposition of the public mind to submit to its influence. The advantage thus gained over predecessors compensates for many points of inferiority, and, at any rate, gives fair encouragement to exertion. We live in an age of which it is the characteristic distinction to gather wisdom from former errors, and not to consider one folly in the light of a precedent for another. This gives men reason to hope, if not to expect, success in attempting reforms which greater talents have failed to accomplish. The moderation and candour of the leading men in the last and present sessions, cannot but have struck all who are accustomed to view the conduct of opposed parties. With very few exceptions, salus populi has, on both sides, been the suprema lex of our debates, and never was a period when personal invective was less frequently employed, or when its employment was so much confined to men of little repute. Let us not regard this as a solitary oasis in our parliamentary annals; let us take a wider view, and hail it as an omen of future union, and of a progressive improvement. "Nothing is more usual," says Hume, "than to see parties which have begun upon a real difference, continue even after that difference is lost. When men are once enlisted on opposite sides, they contract an affection for the persons with whom they are united, and an animosity against their antagonists: and these passions they often transmit to their posterity." Let us encounter and overcome this vain prejudice. Separation still, in some measure, exists, even where difference has ceased; but animosity is advancing in decay, and we appear to have almost within our grasp that most desirable consummation,-a nation enjoying serenity undisturbed by faction, with her councils guided by the combined wisdom of all her ablest statesmen.. Party has been well divided into two genera, party from principle, or party properly so called, and personal party, generally known as faction-distinctions now commonly understood and admitted. Discord has thrown her apple into the British Parliament; we have no Venus in the case, but the decision has too frequently lain between the wisdom of Minerva and the riches of Juno; and the lives of most of our public men have been a kind of diagonal between two faces; they have been actuated partly by public principle, and partly by private interest, and the generality of our national divisions have been of a mixed nature, half party and half faction. Against parties of principle we can say but little. Combinations of men, united to effect alterations which they esteem beneficial, have been long believed to possess practical advantages which more than counterbalance their speculative defects, and the occasional evils which mark their course are, perhaps, not more numerous than might be expected from the usual imperfections attendant on human affairs. But the base union of selfish men in factions; the assemblage of men of high talent joining their powers for the express purpose of injuring their more fortunate fellow-men, for the express purpose of clogging the wheels of government, for the express purpose of obstructing even what is good; and, not content with proposing so iniquitous an end, stooping for its attainment to means equally iniquitous; not only poisoning the springs of domestic enjoyment, but shaking the whole kingdom with their seditious violence; these men keep themselves beyond the letter of the law, but by the complicated intricacy of their wickedness they present an anomaly of human nature, even to the misanthrope. They are political vampires, and against such principles all honest men should unite in a crusade of extermination. The evils arising from "party spirit" have been so numerous; it has been the cause of so much bad feeling, and even the source of so much national calamity, that every true lover of his country must desire its extinction. Bolingbroke well represents its influence as "destroying our inward peace, weakening our national strength, and sullying our glory abroad." And he adds, "it is time, therefore, that all who desire to be esteemed good men, and to procure the peace, the strength, and the glory of their country by the only means by which these can be procured effectually, should join their efforts to heal our national divisions, and to change the narrow spirit of party into a diffusive spirit of public benevolence." There is hardly any class who would not experience the benefit of such an alteration; but those who have the greatest influence, have also, or ought to have, the greatest interest in its promotion. It has been said, we believe truly, that ministers of state, though they may begin their career as warm-hearted patriots, generally become misanthropes before its conclusion. Assuredly, the violence of factious rancour has had no small share in this ruin of fine minds, and this unhappiness of sensitive genius. The free nature of our constitution requires that a minister should be constantly prepared in his place in Parliament to hear his measures canvassed, to explain their expediency, or to defend their necessity; nor would any minister, conscious of integrity, shrink from such exposure. But the petty, and wearying, and unnecessary opposition, the wilful misrepresentation, the trivial cavilling, the personal insults, the teasing slander, the incessant stream of mean and unfair, and even wicked practices, which are ever in vogue against a ministry, both in Parliament, and out of Parliament, these are the things which embitter the duties of men in office, and form a real stain on our national character. Nor let us be told that men, who take upon themselves the offices of ministers of state, ought to be prepared to endure all this buffeting. The political world is, as the old Marshal Privulzio said of the battle of Marignan," a combat of giants," and that country stands at a disadvantage in the struggle of nations, whose men of genius are obstructed in their public duties by the storms of faction, and are obliged to give precedence to the rough nerves of vulgar minds. To be a good minister requires an assemblage of extraordinary qualities, such as are rarely met with, and such as are, in the average of minds, found to be opposed and incompatible. A perfect minister should unite a glowing enthusiasm with a capacity for business; a power of forming a comprehensive plan, with a versatility in the minutiae of detail: sensible of the impulses of passionate ardour, he should yet be beyond their sway; nothing should be above him, and nothing should be beneath him; he should be equally conspicuous for the quickness of his imagination, and for the solidity of his understanding. Habits of routine, and knowledge of form, can never do much in the formation of a statesman; they are the mere instruments of political harmony. In the mind, as in the body, art may improve, but cannot originate simple education could no more impart to a common mind the powers of a fine statesman, than could all the fencingmasters of Ferrara give to a deformed dwarf the dignity of the Apollo Belvidere. Such considerations should surely make us careful how we let party degenerate into faction, how we slide from opposition of measures into opposition of men, and should make us reflect how easily, and almost inadvertently, we may injure our country by selfish and unworthy associations. Besides the alteration which the extinction of faction would produce, with respect to men in office, let us consider how far it would affect the measures which have ever been deemed of paramount importance by men out of office. How great a change would soon occur in our present system of patronage; how great would be our gain by having all offices open to the competition of talent, when the stratagems of faction no longer rendered it absolutely necessary to secure, on any terms, numerical superiority. Again, how different would be the position of the question respecting parliamentary reform, when the nature of parliamentary "oppositions" no longer made borough-influence practically indispensable in carrying on the mechanism of government. We believe that there is no part of our constitution which the removal of this evil would not affect. Medea renewed the youth of Eson by drawing away the old blood from his veins, and pouring into them a fresh infusion, and we think that the extinction of our old spirit of faction would produce a similarly magical effect in our political renovation. Impressed with this conviction, let us inquire how far the present posture of affairs offers an opportunity for furthering such an improvement. Those who wait till they find a ministry in perfect accordance with their wishes, must remain for ever unsatisfied. By temporarily countenancing practical evils in the useless expectation of unattainable speculative perfection, they resemble the old alchemists, living in poverty while seeking the stone that should turn everything into gold, and dying miserably while searching for the elixir that should give them eternal youth. But we will say more than this. We will assert that a cold neutrality, where opinious coincide, is hardly what an honourable man can justify to himself. Warm, and cordial, and frank support is what may be reasonably demanded by every minister, anxious to perform his. duty, from those who do not differ from him as to what that duty is, and as to the means requisite for its fulfilment. And such we believe to be the position of party at the present juncture. In this country there has always been arrayed against every administration a mass of wit and talent, which, had it been organised. by principle instead of being directed by faction, might be referred to with pride as a memorial of national ability, instead of remaining a record of national weakness. The members of the present administration have, in a peculiar manner, been exposed to the shock of unmerited calumny. Till the period when the malady of the late Lord Liverpool occasioned the dissolution of the cabinet of which he was the head, its various members presented the semblance, if they possessed not the reality, of internal harmony, and mutual confidence. But when this Nestor of the council was removed, it was discovered that differences on important topics existed between the several leaders. It was apparent that a policy, distinct from that which they had united in supporting, would be advanced if Mr. Canning became premier; and those who thought that such a course would be prejudicial to the interests of their country, declined joining an administration from which such measures were to emanate. So great and so justly merited was the popularity of Mr. Canning, and such the manner in which the dazzling brilliancy of his genius, as it were, held spell-bound the understandings of his supporters, that it seemed to them unintelligible how any could dissent from his peculiar views. His political opponents were stigmatised as his personal enemies, their firmness was called obstinacy, and their differing from his opinions was the presumption of blindness. Some of the advocates of liberality were found to be the most intolerant of persecutors. So far from applause following those, the firmness of whose principles had led them to resign their honours and emoluments, they were pursued with the keenest malice, and an almost singular instance of disinterested sacrifice was met by a roar of foaming calumny," almost equally unprecedented in virulence. The patriotic reforms of Mr. Peel were no longer remembered, nor was the Duke of Wellington secured even by those achievements which have identified his name with that of Britain. He stood amidst the storm Qualis frugifero quercus sublimis in agro "The tide of popularity has turned," and its retiring wave left stranded the noble vessels which its full current had once buoyed up. Popular clamour had begun to subside, when the present ministers were invited to office; but immediately on their acceptance of it, not only before any act had been committed worthy of censure, but even before it was known what line of policy would be pursued, a second storm of factious invective arose, outstripping the ferment of the previous outcry, and almost unparalleled in the annals of party fury. Never did the public press present such united opposition. Irish declamation, Scotch sophistry, and English doggedness, seemed to form a second Cerberus, possessing three heads, but moved by one spirit, and using its monstrous terrors to scare to |