his foot upon the commanding eminence of the premiership, the sight
which presented itself to his quick and comprehensive glance, must have
been, indeed, one calculated to make

--"the boldest hold his breath
For a time."

What appalling evidence in every direction of the ignorance and madness
of his predecessors! An exchequer empty, exactly at the moment when it
ought to have been fullest, in order to support our tremendous
operations in the East and elsewhere: in fact, a prospect of immediate
national insolvency; all resources, ordinary and extraordinary,
exhausted; all income anticipated: an average deficiency of revenue,
actual and estimated, in the six years next preceding the 5th of January
1843, of L.10,072,000! Symptoms of social disorganization visible on the
very surface of society: ruin bestriding our mercantile interests,
palsied every where by the long pressure of financial misrule: credit
vanishing rapidly: the working-classes plunged daily deeper and deeper
into misery and starvation, ready to listen to the most desperate
suggestions: and a Government bewildered with a consciousness of
incompetency, and of the swiftly approaching consequences of their
misrule, at the eleventh hour--on the eve of a general election--
suddenly resolving (in the language of their own leader) to stir society
to its foundations, by proposing a wild and ruinous alteration in the
Corn-Laws, declaring that it, and it only, would bring cheap bread to
the doors of the very poorest in the land:--after the manner of giving
out ardent spirits to an already infuriated mob. In Ireland, crime and
sedition fearfully in the ascendant; treasonable efforts made to
separate her from us; threats even held out of her entering into a
foreign alliance against us. So much for our domestic--now for our