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Untitled Article
well asaured that no one , not already acquainted with the facts , will recognize the individual . Since the above was written , a Committee has been appointed , at the instance of Mr . Shiel ' s friends ., to investigate the charges against him , and the inquiry has terminated in his complete and honourable acquittal . His first accuser , Mr . Hill , has made all
the reparation in his power , but too late to save his own credit , which has received a shock it will not easily recover . Lord Alt horp pleads guilty only of having acted imprudently as a man and as a minister ; though he confesses , that he had given a false impression of the purport of what his informant told him . To misunderstand and misstate facts to the injury of another , is that only imprudence ? Would it not have been as easy to put the question to Mr . John Wood before as after uttering the calumny ?
Lord Althorp will not escape so easily as he probably flatters himself : he is more deeply culpable than he perhaps thinks ,, and it will require many good deeds to obliterate the memory of this act of criminal recklessness . The debates on this affair will reveal to the world without , much more , we suspect , than they previously knew , of the state of parliamentary morality . If Mr . Shiel had really done what Lord Althorp imputed to him ; if in private society he had declared himself favourable to the Coercion Bill , while in Parliament he was speaking and voting against it ; few ,, very few members of parliament would have been entitled to throw the first stone : but the act itself would have been not the less a disgraceful one , and no electors could , without great folly , have again returned such a man to Parliament . Yet all those who took part with Mr . Shiel , not content with excusing the man , exculpated the act too : it stands recorded as their opinion , that a man
whose private professions are at variance with his public conduct , does no wrong ; it was what they were all liable to . That they are almost all liable to it is too true , and they would have felt the confession a most humiliating- one , if they were not from habit callous to their own ignominy . Sir Francis Burdett , went furthest , and was the most unabashed , in his avowal that in the moral code of Parliament hypocrisy was no vice . This is not the first time that Sir Francis Burdett has made himself
conspicuous by uttering sentiments even more scandalously imnioral than the House is accustomed to hear : not that he is in reality worse than the rest , but on the contrary better ; for he is more unconscious , less of a hypocrite himself , and when he speaks out what they all think , does it in mere naivete .
The ' Examiner' of February 16 th has commented upon the whole affair in its best manner ; . taking a just and discriminating view of the case as it affects Mr . Shiel , and reading a lesson to the members of the House , such as they seldom receive , and still more seldom profit by .
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168 Notes on the Newspapers .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1834, page 166, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2631/page/6/
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