Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/288

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blanche to the Government, and putting the people under military execution. At this rate, the worse the Government, the more firmly it ought to be rooted: the greater the abuse of confidence, the more blind and unlimited the confidence ought to be: and any administration need only bring a nation to the brink of ruin, in order to have a right to plunge it into the depths of slavery. It is easy to keep the peace with the sword;—more flattering to the pride of power to crush resistance to oppression, than to remove the causes of it. To reduce a people to the alternative of rebellion or of arbitrary sway, does not require the talents of a great statesman. If Lord Castlereagh claims the merit of having reduced us to that alternative, we shall not dispute it with him: whatever may be the result, we cannot thank him.

His Lordship might, however, have made good his retreat, with a decent orderly appearance, if he had not chosen to go out of his way to take up a Spy behind him on his new metaphysical charger, and to ride the high horse over all those, who are not the fast friends and staunch admirers of that profession, as traitors and no true men. Sir Francis Burdett, not relishing this assault of the master and man, pulled off the Squire, and rolling him in the mud, pelted him so unmercifully with Irish evidence and musty affidavits of his friends and relations, that his gallant patron, seeing the plight he was in, dismounted, and was condescending enough to acknowledge, that "cruelty was in every species detestable," and that "he lamented to think that there were miscreants in human nature capable of committing crime for the love of reward;" sentiments not new indeed, but new in his Lordship's mouth. The country gentlemen must have felt relieved, and Lord Lascelles's hat have recovered its primitive shape! The House of Commons is no dupe; Lord Castlereagh no driveller. Would he then seriously persuade them, that the Spy hanged his old friends and accomplices out of pure love to his country, and disinterested friendship to his Lordship? We would advise the noble Lord in the blue ribbon to cut his parliamentary connexion with his police acquaintance at once. The thing cannot answer;