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* He believed tHat that portion of the House of Lords whicH clung to old and hereditary abuses , constituted but ft rery small minority of that assembly , arid he felt satisfied , in comiqon with the noble Lord ( Se&grave ) , that they would not obstinately resist what they saw the people , from a sense of right , calmly determined to obtain . Better reasons for this belief are desirable than
those which his Lordship adduced , viz . the conduct of the Peert on the Municipal Reform and the Irish Church Bills . Tfce opinion of the public had been long enou g h , and strongly enough , expressed on the former , to render perfectly absurd his Lordship ' s version of the motives of their conduct ; and ,, as to the division in the Commons on the latter , what produced the return of such a House ? No man , we presume , can be found to contend that
opinion had retrograded on this subject , from the last Session of the previous Parliament . Lord Ebrington is a far-going believer ; but , granting him all his faith , is a mode of legislation to be kept up , not as a means of public benefit , but simply because there is an extreme point beyond which it will not , ana beyond
which it cannot , obstruct the public good ? By the very statement itself , the will to resist is only bounded by the powet ; and the most abominable despotism on the face of tne earth might be defended against reform on the same principle . What possible good can result from a contrivance for driving the people , on every great question , to the verge of rebellion before it can be carried ? This theory is less consistent than the old one of the three powers . A House of Lords with a real efficient veto is
intelligible , though intolerable . But a House of Lords for the purpose of resisting and yielding , is simply a provision for everlasting irritation , agitation , and strife . There is only one point on which a body so constituted should be put to the trouble of yielding . The sooner it is tried on that point the better .
It must be presumed to have been in his original poetical cha ? racter that Mr . Moore answered for the morality of the Peerage , (and added his own voucher to the testimony of the ' distinguished American Radical leader / that in taste , in intelligence , and in all the graces of social life , '— the higher one rises in society the
purer is the atmosphere . ' The voucher is a valuable addition , because no American Radical , though he might have dined with a dozen Peers , could possibly have risen so high in his social intercourse , or have seen so much , as Mr . Moore himself . ' Tain kenn'd what was what fu' brawly . * He had ascended ' an earthly guest and drawn empyrean air , ' in that purest of atmospheres
which exhaled around the presence of George , Prince of Wales , while yet a Regent , and not unworthy of the name . Hpwever , aft Mr . Moore declares that , in order to be patriotic , it is » 9 jt necessary to be uncivil , * we will leave this point of ri ^ bte morality only adding that it has nothing to do with the re ^ merit * of the cafe , for If your moral people be mischievoite , as n 6 t unfrequently
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1835, page 759, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2652/page/3/
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