value might be fairly estimated at about 250,000l.; so that his contribution, under the head of house duty, ought to have been 20001. a year at least, taking rate, and value, and class, fairly into consideration, as Adam Smith intended; instead of which it was only a shilling under fourteen guineas per annum! And this is the chastity of honour, declared by the great master of rhetoric to be peculiarly inherent to an order of nobility! The window-tax would be found little better, had we room for its dissection. So again, when an ordinary individual erects a new habitation he had to pay duty upon bricks, tiles, and timber, and has still on the first and last of them. But the grandeethe proprietor of veins of clay, quarries of sandstone, granite, and marble, or forests of oak, fir, larch, and beech, may avoid the levy altogether, with proper management. Felling his own woods, working his own pits, making his own bricks, will carry him through clear: so long, we mean, as these articles are not sold, but only retained for private use. About melting his own glass we are not so sure; but the anomaly is quite sufficiently enormous as it stands. Verily has an oligarchy so moulded our Exchequer, that if it be the rich man's paradise, it is the poor man's purgatory. For the latter, a fearful Excise never slumbers nor sleeps.

Quis tam crudeles optavit sumere pœnas?

Even the stamps exhibit similar features; although one might have thought that the Vectigal Charta, being of Dutch origin, must of necessity wear a more mercantile aspect. But conveyances, for instance, are so arranged, that the lesser fry of purchasers have to pay from five per cent, downwards and upwards; the large leviathans only from one per cent. downwards. An estate of half a million may change owners under a stamp duty of about one-fifth merely per cent. The stamp for the lease of a cottage worth 101. per annum is 17.; that for a farm at a rent of 1000l. per annum, or any higher amount, and therefore worth 30,000l. and upwards, as the case may be, only pays 107.; so that the peasant has to pay ten times more than the capitalist, the gentleman, or the noble. It was the profound, yet just remark, of a keen financier, ten years ago, that 'the problem of the aristocracy in all things, has been to lay taxes so that the degree in which every man shall pay a greater share in proportion to his poverty shall be a maximum! The minimum that same system has reserved for its own members; for, as is well known, whilst personal property, the general support of the middle and lower classes, has to pay legacy and probate duties from one to ten per cent., the vast landed fees of our dukes, marquises, earls, barons, baronets, and squirearchy,

can and do claim an entire exemption! The Buccleugh, Northumberland, and Stafford estates, such as many European sovereigns might well covet, and which exceed far the entire revenues ever dreamt of by the father, and various reigning relatives of our own queen's consort, all descend from generation to generation, paying nothing. It is said, we know not how truly, that Lord Westminster may ere long possess a rental coming up, in the gross, to a thousand pounds sterling per diem; which of course would be worth from ten to eleven millions sterling. This immense estate might go to a tenth cousin without any will being made, and without contributing a single sixpence to the public treasury. 'But if the heir, whoever it might be, contributed in the same ratio with the inheritor of a paltry 2007., he would have to pay into the Exchequer, as legacy duty, 1,100,000l., and as probate duty 440,0007.; in all, 1,540,000%.' We are aware that, in fact, no probate duty is payable above a million; which again only demonstrates to a nicety how tender our magnates always are of their own order, and even of the wealthy capitalist who may venture sometimes to vie with it. We could proceed much further, were there any occasion for it, which there is not. We simply charge the aristocracy with having so contrived these imposts as to have plundered the country, during the last century and a half, of an aggregate of millions sterling, which our readers may imagine more accurately than we can venture to state it. We need not stay to prove that, substantially, during that period, the House of Commons has been under the control and nomination of the House of Lords down to the Reform Bill; or that whenever a removal of grievances has been called for, they have had their objections! We must hasten forward to snatch a peep at the manner in which an aristocracy bears upon religion and the rights of conscience.

It must be borne in mind too that this aristocracy is our own, and like all others must be judged by its results. The world is surely old enough not to expect grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. No one will therefore be startled at perceiving the sword and sceptre of monopoly extended into the innermost recesses of the human soul. A proud and pampered peerage has always declared, that it must have high prices put upon the necessaries of this life, that its social position may be maintained; whilst at the same time, proh prudor! the hopes and fears of a life to come must also acknowledge its influence, to defend us from fanaticism and revolution. Hence the presumed necessity for an Established Church; which church, moreover, must have a creed and discipline precisely squared upon such religious model as the before-mentioned aristocracy may think

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proper; for there is nothing like leather,' and there are noble scions to be provided for-brothers to be manufactured into bishops, sons to be turned into deans and prebendaries, nephews and relations and connexions to be thrust into fat livings, warm glebe-houses, and sundry anonymous preferments, sine curá animarum! The episcopal bench also must be placed in the upper chamber, that oligarchy and hierarchy may be blended, that mitres may mingle with coronets, that lawn sleeves may secure veneration for scarlet robes, that the State may be supposed to have a conscience, and that if democracy should roar for reformation, abuses screened from observation may seem to be attacked or denounced through the sides and shield of religion! In this way have our rulers confounded things temporal with things spiritual; whilst to feed the monstrous fraud, endowments, to the extent of millions upon millions, go to nourish a political priesthood, and secularize that which is holy. Nor is this all; for to protect the entire system there must be terrors as well as allurements; thunderbolts for opponents, as well as rewards and dainties for adherents. Hence have arisen all the blessings of church-rates, ecclesiastical courts, surrogates, proctors, chancellors, and Doctors Commons; through whose means the enthroned Establishment opens her palms for fees and payments, out of the wills of testators, the effects of the departed, the nuptials of her children when married, and their matrimonial quarrels afterwards. The most sacred institution of God is thus metamorphosed into a painted harlot. Her love of money is strong as death; her jealousy of power cruel as the grave. Is she told of catholics and nonconformists in the land? her pride will recognise the existence of neither the one nor the other. Is she assured that these two, taken together in the United Kingdom, reach a number nearly twice that of her own followers? what is that to her: 'We are the people, and wisdom will die with us; the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are we!' Is national education called for, even through a benevolent member of the governing class? her reply is, 'Take it, then, upon the moderate conditions that we nominate all the schoolmasters, and hold the helm of the whole matter! Our modesty is only paralleled by our toleration, for we are the Catholics of England and Ireland; and what have we to do with the idolatries of Romanism, or the radical scruples of sectarians?' These are in effect their very professions and expressions, appealing, as we now do, to the Oxford Tracts' and the 'Record' newspaper! Aristocracy and an established hierarchy are but Siamese twins, united by the ligament of exclusiveness. They have always been ready to hunt down the rights of private judgment together, just so far as public opinion would permit them.

After the Restoration, zealous efforts were carried forward in the House of Lords to restore the Star Chamber, and a committee of peers went so far as to report that such a court was fit for the good of the nation.' They longed for the ears of any rising Prynnes, or Bastwicks, or Leightons, who might summon out of the dust another Marprelate to make Archbishop Laud whisper from his sepulchre, were it possible, that vengeance had once brought a metropolitan to the block, and might perhaps do it again. By the conduct of our privileged Patricians, from the reign of Queen Anne to that of Queen Victoria, we are ready to let our assertion stand or fall, that no oligarchy can ever be brought to respect fully the rights of conscience. The Corporation and Test Acts in former days, or the recent Marriage and Registration Bills, are but specimens illustrative of what we mean. Sic volo, sic jubeo, stat pro ratione voluntas, we may rely upon it, is substantially neither more nor less than the genuine motto of our aristocracy.

If, then, such be its character and consequences at home, does it improve under the survey, when its operations are considered abroad, with respect to its foreign policy? We think not. Lord Brougham would indeed imply that our diplomacy, having been impregnated with the leaven of that system which is now under investigation, must be essentially pacific. Yet, let us look into the evidence, going even no further back than the Revolution. When William was straining every nerve against Louis XIV., did any influential section of the peerage restrain, or endeavour to restrain, his majesty's warlike propensities? Quite the reverse. Both whig and tory lords fanned every spark of mischief into a conflagration. They coquetted with the royal exiles. They acted as hired spies to the enemy. From twenty-five to thirty of them are criminated by the Dalrymple and Macpherson papers. Marlborough communicated to the French ministry the secret of an expedition against Brest. They sowed the seeds of future conflicts by the measures into which they coerced their sovereign at Ryswick. In the war of the Spanish succession, when, after the victories of Blenheim and Ramillies, peace might have been attained, they banded with Godolphin, Eugene, and Heinsius, to protract the struggle, which covered them with military glory and indefinite emoluments. The treaty of Utrecht, bad as it was in itself, and good only so far as it staunched the wounds of Europe, required a dozen new creations to sanction it. What shall be said to the affairs of Aix-la-Chapelle and Paris, in 1748 and 1763, when, through the influence of peers, our commercial were sacrificed to our colonial interests; the latter being valuable to the nobles, and the former only to the nation at large? What was it which

plunged us into the grand continental Mäelstrom of 1793?— when the son of Lord Chatham forsook his earlier principles and pledges, and cast in his lot for life with the opponents of the people? His excuse was, that massacre was riding over an adjacent kingdom upon a war-horse drenched in gore; yet what had we to do with ought else than to protect our own shores? Orators strove to frighten women and children with visions of confusion and revolution; but William Pitt perfectly knew that, notwithstanding a few treasonable societies in London, our middle and respectable classes had a detestation equal to his own of everything really connected with pillage and disorder. They had in the aggregate far more to lose by tumult and confiscation, than the proud patricians, or their nominees in the House of Commons. The noble craftsmen of Ephesus, however, played their part to admiration, amidst the cheers of toryism and the benedictions of the clergy. Hostilities against the enemies of God and man filled every mouth and every mind. The press, the pulpit, and, high over all, the House of Lords, resounded with denunciations against republicans and levellers. Religion, as usual, was much upon the lips of some of the most profligate wretches upon earth; but the object nearest and dearest was to defend the image of the great goddess Diana, which fell down out of heaven from Jupiter,-the peerage! Let Colonel Napier be heard, even with regard to the Peninsular war; when the restoration of Ferdinand VII. loomed dimly in the distant prospect: the occult source of difficulty is to be found in the inconsistent attempts of the British cabinet to uphold national independence, with internal slavery, against foreign aggression, with an ameliorated government. The clergy, who led the mass of Spanish patriots, clung to the English, because they supported aristocracy and church domination. The British ministers hating Napoleon, not because he was the enemy of England, but because he pretended to be the champion of equality, cared not for Spain, unless the people were enslaved. They were willing enough to use a liberal cortes to defeat Buonaparte, but they also desired to put down that cortes by the aid of the clergy and the more bigoted part of the people.' We conscientiously believe that liberty has scarcely ever been sacrificed in any country upon the face of the earth, in modern times, without an English aristocrat assisting at the ceremony: from the Lilliputian republics of Parga or Genoa, to the more colossal, but not more atrocious crimes, which have rendered us lords of Delhi and Hindostan, from the Bay of Bengal to the boundaries of the Himmalaya and the Indus.

It strikes us, therefore, that Mr. Macintyre is right, and Lord