any sign peculiarly full of evil omen to the opponents of Reform,
it is that very calmness of the public mind on which they found
their expectation of success. They think that it is the calmness
of indifference. It is the calmness of confident hope: and in
proportion to the confidence of hope will be the bitterness of
disappointment. Disappointment, indeed, I do not anticipate.
That we are certain of success in this House is now acknowledged;
and our opponents have, in consequence, during the whole of this
Session, and particularly during the present debate, addressed
their arguments and exhortations rather to the Lords than to the
assembly of which they are themselves Members. Their principal
argument has always been, that the bill will destroy the peerage.
The honourable and learned Member for Rye has, in plain terms,
called on the Barons of England to save their order from
democratic encroachments, by rejecting this measure. All these
arguments, all these appeals, being interpreted, mean this:
"Proclaim to your countrymen that you have no common interests
with them, no common sympathies with them; that you can be
powerful only by their weakness, and exalted only by their
degradation; that the corruption which disgusts them, and the
oppression against which their spirit rises up, are indispensable
to your authority; that the freedom and purity of election are
incompatible with the very existence of your House. Give them
clearly to understand that your power rests, not as they have
hitherto imagined, on their rational convictions, or on their
habitual veneration, or on your own great property, but on a
system fertile of political evils, fertile also of low iniquities
of which ordinary justice take cognisance. Bind up, in
inseparable union, the privileges of your estate with the
grievances of ours: resolve to stand or fall with abuses visibly