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Untitled Article
It is far better to continue an evil in a degree so intolerable that its own viciousness must compel its removal , than to make it just endurable enough to be preferred to the labour requisite to its extinction . This is a principle on which the Whigs have never dreamt of acting . The most unprejudiced and mature reflection on their past conduct will be found necessarily to lead
to one of these two conclusions ;—either they believe their passive permanence in office essential to the country , and that it is their duty to adopt any course which may secure it ; or , caring nothing about duty , they adopt the best means merely of securing their own salaries . To conceive that men , gifted as they all must be , more or less , with common sense , can honestly believe
the former is wholly absurd ; we are , therefore , constrained to adopt the latter view of their conduct . This pitiful truckling demeanour towards the Lords has now been carried through a second , nay a third session , utterly lost to the existing generation , who anxiously await the fruits of labours and exertions which have already characterised the
century . Mr Bell , at the Sheffield election , has pithily put the Whigs in the following dilemma— " Either they are able to cope with the Lords , or they are not ; if they are not able to cope with the House of Lords , they are swindlers for taking pay for a thing which they cannot do ; if they can , then they are traitors for not doing it . "
Perhaps the most palpable evidence of the bad faith of the Ministers is to be found in the melancholy equivocations put forth by Lord John Russell , on the subject of Church-rates . Lord John Russell has less excuse for delay or shuffling on this
point , than on any other in the whole range of his misdeeds . He tiever had more than one solitary idea on the subject ; and but one hopeful escape—lie now finds it is no escape—from the difficulties his timid servility has encompassed him in—and that is in levying Church-rates on the Consolidated Fund . He knows
perfectly well that he hit upon this ingenious scheme nearly two years ago ; and he is , at any rate , now thoroughly convinced that it will not satisfy the Dissenters , or any part or portion of them . He may fcave himself the discredit ot any equivocation , and the trouble of any further preparation on the point . His scheme will not do ; neither will he do—neither will any of them do—for the spirit of the times that are at hand ! The
progress of social regeneration is just as little to be aided by the mental , as by the bodily powers , of such a meagre gentleman as Lord John Russell . Hut if it cannot be advanced , assuredly neither will it be lone retarded b y him . In the interim , whilst the intellect of the masses is maturing fttt its energies for carrying out the principles which promise
Untitled Article
494 The Past Session .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1836, page 574, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2661/page/50/
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