has not yet been agreed to by the king of the Netherlands; but that your Majesty trusts the period is not far distant when that sovereign will see the necessity of acceding to an arrangement in which the plenipotentiaries of the five Powers have unanimously concurred, and which we are assured by your Majesty has been framed with the most careful and impartial attention to all interests concerned." Earl Grey agreed that the proposed alteration was an improvement on the address, and that the address should have been so worded at first; for it certainly had never been intended to pledge their lordships to any opinion upon a treaty which had not yet come regularly before them. Lord Camperdown accordingly adopted the alteration as part of the original address.

In the Commons, sir Charles Wetherell brought particularly under the notice of the House, that part of the royal speech which related to the riots at Bristol. To enter into the details of those outrages, while inquiries into their causes were in progress, would, he said, be unscasonable; but in so far as he himself was connected with these events, he stood in a different situation. He had been directly charged by the daily press as being the author of the late events at Bristol. If any part of this accusation were true, he should feel it his duty to retire from the House; but the charge was false in all its parts, and known to be false by those who made it. These accusations against him had been promulgated in newspapers avowedly in connection with the government; these prints had charged him with going to Bristol to exercise the functions of his judicial office, against the remonstrauces of

his Majesty's government, and of the magistrates of Bristol; yet every part of the statements so made, day after day, by papers in daily communication with the Treasury, was base, false, and slanderous. How stood the facts? A deputation from Bristol, consisting of the sheriff and one of the aldermen, had waited on him, and had stated, that the person of the recorder, who, in the exercise of his official duties, should make a public entry into the city, would not, under the circumstances of the period, be safe. A conversation then took place, in the course of which he inquired, whether the magistrates could not furnish a constabulary force adequate to the maintenance of the public peace. In the opinion of the deputation a sufficient constabulary force could not be furnished. In consequence of this he desired the deputation to wait on the secretary for the Home Department; and he had absented himself from the interview, in order that the noble secretary might put any inquiries without the restriction which his presence possibly might have imposed. The deputation accordingly waited on the noble secretary, and military assistance was furnished. The noble lord subsequently requested his attendance at the Home-office, and he did attend. Now, in the first instance, the information was conveyed to government that military assistance was requisite. On the second occasion, it was arranged that every thing should go on as usual; this was done in the presence of some members of the cabinet, amongst whom, however, neither the noble lord (Althorp), nor the right hon. gentleman opposite (Mr. Stanley), were numbered. Thus, if government thought that military co-ope

ration was necessary, and that it was also necessary to suspend the usual gaol delivery, there existed two opportunities for declaring the facts -one in his (Sir C. W.'s) absence, the other in his presence. He had in his own mind discussed whether by any mode the public ceremonial of his entry might be dispensed with, but he came to the conclusion that this was impossible. The noble secretary, he repeated, had agreed that all should go on as usual. Was not this, then, a flat contradiction of the charges which had been so flagitiously circulated against him?-charges not merely kept up in the daily prints of London for a fortnight-not merely diffused throughout the country by the veins and arteries of the public press-but at last echoed in Paris by one of the prints there. Not only did The Times, the Globe, and the Courier trumpet forth the calumny, but there was a replication of the notes on the banks of the Seine. The morning calumny of The Times was not eclipsed by the evening irradiation of the Sun. The Courier also took every opportunity of adding its comments upon his conduct in terms the most stringent and personally offensive -whatever, in short, malignity could devise. The Paris papers proclaimed that the recorder had been condemned by the coleriesto what coteries the Parisian journalist alluded, he could not divine. Of course the current of slander in Ireland kept pace with the rest. This must be considered a little provoking to any man-it was rather too much to put up with; but, notwithstanding, he should have deemed himself unfit to occupy the situation he did, if he had entered into any expostulation with the gentlemen of the press.

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Had he entered into any such expostulation, he should have felt that he had degraded his character as a gentleman, and the commission which he had the honour to hold. It had been farther alleged, that he had proceeded to Bristol against the remonstrances of the magistrates, when they sent to Bath, beseeching him not to come. This charge, like the other, was utterly unfounded. The magistrates themselves were also abused for an irritating display of the military, whereas, in fact, the soldiers were not stationed in Bristol, but were placed under cover in the neighbourhood, and, but for the interference of the political union, their presence would not have been known to the people of the city. necessary display of the military had been avoided by the judicious plans of the magistrates. He would follow the example afforded by the royal speech, and abstain from going into the consideration of what had subsequently occurred, simply stating, that he did not retire until the chief magistrate's feather-bed was taken from its accustomed depository, and used as a barricade for a window of the Mansion-househall. All the transactions of Sunday and Monday had taken place after his departure from Bristol. He conceived that, under the circumstances which he had laid before them, he might presume that in the eyes of that House he had exculpated himself. If any hon, member were of opinion that he had failed in doing so, he might reasonably demand from the liberality, impartiality, honesty, and courage, which ought to characterize every member of that House, on whatever side he sat, that he should rise up and tell him what other course he could have pursued. To

what personal abuse would he not have been subjected by the manytongued, foul-mouthed, and venomous press, if he had abstained from going to Bristol in consequence of threats of personal violence? The unions would loudly have declared, that he was falsely imputing to them the fabrication of tumults, and of tumults directed against the administration of justice, which had never been contemplated. They would have pronounced it the falsehood of an anti-reformer, the mere invention of his own baseness, and would have stigmatized him as a coward who framed lying calumnies to shield his own pusillanimity. It had been said, that the occurrences at Bristol did not spring out of reform, but had been perpetrated by delinquents ever ready to take advantage of any opportunity for plunder. He would not inquire at present how far these outrages were owing to the spirit which reformers had conjured up; he would only draw the notice of the House to a document by which the Bristol political union-a reform association-assumed to itself the power of deposing the magis trates and the recorder. This paper, which had been published on the 25th of October, set forth the surprise of the council of the union at the conduct of the corporation in having called in the assistance of the troops for the purpose of conducting the recorder into the city-a statement which was not true. It then stated, that, if the magistrates found themselves incapable of maintaining the public peace without military aid, it was their duty to resign, and allow the citizens to elect the municipal authorities. Who the electors were to be was not intimated; but here was an association telling the magistrates that they ought to resign,

rather than use the aid of the military for the preservation of the public peace. And this document, after recommending sedition, and worse than sedition, added a recommendation to the reformers to respect the public peace! He could not join in the applause given by the seconder of the address to government for the "promptitude" which they had displayed in appointing the special commission, and had that word been introduced into the address, he must have moved an amendment. More than three weeks before the riots at Bristol, he had called their attention to what had happened at Nottingham, and had stated, that if persons were allowed to act on the principle of public vengeance, there would be found to be but a slight partition wall between Nottingham castle and the house of any other anti-reformer. It was the duty of government to have issued a special commission at that period, but hitherto the Gazette was silent. Even in the commission which had been issued for Bristol, how came it that the magistrates, and he himself, the recorder of the city, had been omitted? He had put in his claim to be included in it, as a matter of right, he had asserted that claim before the home sccretary, and likewise the lord chancellor. He would not charge the government with being influenced by the wish personally to degrade himself and the magistracy; but he would say, that they had committed a grievous error in not including in the commission every person who was entitled, by the charter of the city, to assist at the gaol delivery-and all this was done to gratify the political unions, with one of which lord John Russell had corresponded, after it had

adopted a resolution approximating closely to high treason. It was those unions that had deposed the magistrates and recorder of Bristol. The only precedent in point to sanction this proceeding, had the name of Jefferies attached to it a name which did not use to rank very high in general estimation. While he agreed with that portion of the king's speech which stated that his Majesty never could sanction any interference with the legitimate rights of the people to make known their grievances, yet, if the remainder of that portion were designed to apply to the Birmingham union alone, as the only association illegally constituted, he must pronounce the proposition to be equally ill-founded and ill-advised. The Bristol union was equally illegal; the associations which had declared hereditary rights unnatural, and the unions in London, from which sir Francis Burdett had withdrawn his name, were equally illegal.

Mr. G. Lamb, under secretary of state in the Home Department, disclaimed all connection with the libels of the Press, and all intention of impugning the chartered rights of Bristol. It had been to government a grave and serious question, whether the threats of violence called for an interruption of the regular course of the administration of justice. In the first of the interviews to which Sir C. Wetherell had alluded, two of the magistrates of Bristol had requested military assistance, which was accorded to them after their admission that the police of the city was unequal to the preservation of the peace. With respect to the second interview, it was much as it had been described by the hon. and learned member, with the exception of one addition, which he should supply, namely, that his

Majesty's government were never asked to pronounce an opinion, whether the sessions ought or ought not to have been postponed. All that was submitted to them was, the circumstance that there was not in Bristol a sufficient force for the maintenance of the public peace. A military force was therefore granted; it also moved to the spot, and was eventually found perfectly adequate to effect the object. He could only say, that whoever had brought accusations against the hon, and learned gentleman, he had not; and he believed that he could make the same assertion on behalf of every member of the King's government. He asserted, however, in opposition to the hon. and learned gentleman, that the government had displayed promptitude upon that occasion. Promptitude did not imply hurry

it meant that just speed which left time for the employment of all those means which were necessary to prevent a measure from being defeated. It was extraordinary that a lawyer of the high pretensions of his hon. and learned friend should use such strange language as had fallen from his lips, when he said, that after the walls of Nottingham Castle were burnt down, a special commission should have been sent the next evening by the mail into that county. Had his hon. and learned friend considered what previous inquiries were necessary before a special commission could issue? Must not the government know something about the number of prisoners taken, and the evidence against them? In this instance, it was not ten days since the depositions had been received in London, and yet he thought that a special commission ought to have been issued, even before the prison. ers were caught, and their com