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I tithe at all is paid this year ? Wait till the next . To support the in-( cumbents for one year , there will be no difficulty in raising a sum by loan i on the security of the future fund . 18 /^ July . The Ministerial Changes . —The ministry has lost its chief , and is about to go on with little other alteration . The change ,
however , is not a trifling one . The occasion seems insignificant , compared with the magnitude of the result ; but so seemed the division on the Civil List , which turned out the Wellington Ministry . In both cases , what seemed the cause was but the pebble in the road , which shook to pieces the already crazy vehicle . Lord Grey could not long remain Minister after the Reform Bill . He was the man to carry through a Reform Bill , not the man to execute it . We say this not in disparagement , but , on the contrary , with the most
unfeigned respect . Lord Grey is a far braver man , a loftier man , a man of greater dignity of character , with more of the heroic in his composition , than any member of what is now the Ministry , or than all of them put together . But he is of the old school ; they are willing to be of the new . Lord Grey has principles , they are men of shifts and circum * stances ; but his principles are unfit for these times , and he cannot change them . He is the very man he was in 1789 . Age has neither corrupted him nor brought him wisdom *
When Lord Grey , in early youth , adopted Reform principles , the people of England were mostly satisfied with the main features of their institutions , and complained only of extravagant expenditure and a few superficial abuses . If Reform had been carried at that time , these would have been remedied , and the social machine generally would have re * mained untouched . The people would not have had their eyes opened to the great and rapidly-increasing vices of their social polity in general .
Government would have been cheap and bad ,, and so it would have remained until the mere progress of philosophy , unaided by any previous ^ tlienation of the people from the ruling- classes , had convinced them of its defects . This might have required centuries . Tiroes are altered now ; but Lord Grey is still o ( the same mind . He still sees no evils in our social condition , but those which the people then saw ; and if he had his way , Reform would now lead to no consequences but those to
which it would then have led . But fifty years of public discontent , though they have made no changes in Lord Grey ' s opinions , have made a wonderful revolution in those of mankind . The people are now possessed with an opinion that their institutions , en masse , are in many respects bad , and a cause of evil to them . Lord Grey partly perceives and recognises as a fact , the prevalence of this new opinion , but without
any perception of its justice ; and his object—his conscientious objectis to prevent the new opinion from having its way ; to stem the current which has set in towards change . A man who thus resists the just and necessary tendencies of his times is not fit to be Minister . It may be very fit that those tendencies should be moderated , but by their friends , not by their enemies .
Lord Grey has recently , in a most forcible manner , expressed his sense of the folly of those who resist ' the spirit of the age ; ' nor would he have opposed any obstinate or rash resistance to that spirit ; but being &t heart its foe , he would have done his utmost to discountenance it , aod would have embroiled himself with it in his own despite ; as this
Untitled Article
The Ministerial Changes . 595
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1834, page 595, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2636/page/65/
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