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    have be £ n artificiall y excited ; some selfish interests in the country there doubtless are , which the security of a monopoly , or the repeal of a tax , may make the friends or the foes of any Government ; some action there may have been of demagogues upon the multitude for individual aggrandizement ; the immediate effect of

    those organic reforms in which some classes are interested , may have been inordinately estimated ; there may be in some quarters a blind desire of mere change , or an aimless restlessness , or an insane tendency towards violence : but purblind indeed must the politicians be , who dream that these constitute any sensible portion of the real social movement , any calculable fraction of the impulse

    which drives it on , or that it can be arrested by their repression . They might as well tie up the vane to change the wind ; or catch and fix the twigs that are whirling about when the air and the ground are convulsed with the heavings of the earthquake . The new Premier hopes that' the people are tired of agitation : ' of party

    squabbles and compromises ; of court intrigues , and of the blind obstinacy of the privileged ; of empty professions , broken pledges , and disappointed expectations , they are tired ; but the spirit of Reform is no more likely to rest in satisfaction , or go to sleep in weariness , than the just liberated eagle to flag on the wing at the very commencement of its upward flight .

    Whatever determined stand may be made on behalf of the Church , that institution will probably be the next to yield to the public feeling . It will not be pulled down by the Dissenters . They neither understand the Church nor Dissent , who expect the conflict to be between these parties . The sectarian spirit of the present times is not that of the seventeenth century . The

    Dissenters will achieve the redress of their own grievances , and be quiet . They will not , as a body , wage war with the Establishment on the abstract principle ; nor will any other class . But the present Ecclesiastical Constitution cannot long survive the deep conviction which is becoming general , that it works but

    little of moral good for the community , and that it presents the most formidable obstacle to almost every measure of real improvement . There is a growing determination that it shall be made of use , or be unmade . Every intelligent Reformer deprecates the latter alternative , so far as it would throw the Ecclesiastical funds

    into the landlord's grasp , and would preserve this grand national endowment intact for the appropriate purposes of national instruction , of the best and most comprehensive description . The silly assumption of hereditary wisdom , or the barefaced avowal that , not the wise to govern , but the interested in

    misgovernment , shall guide a community at their pleasure , cannot long be tolerated . They are condemned in men ' s minds , and the decent and hollow respect of words , * mouth-honour , ' is all they have left to live upon . The time was , when the Peerage of this country was better qualified to rule than the Commonalty ; rightly then had the Upper House its privileges : the time was

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    The True Spirit of Reform . t

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1835, page 7, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2641/page/7/