and it had in view a still further extension of its operations.In my paper of the 14th August I wrote:—
"Parliament meets at Westminster on Thursday. The conference of ministers of the gospel upon the Corn Laws meets at Manchester on Tuesday. There will be about the same number of persons in the latter named assemblage as there are members of the House of Commons. The majority of the one owe their seats to intimidation, and to bribery, and corruption, in all the most painful forms. The united body of the other consists of pastors freely elected by their several congregations, enjoying their love and confidence, and deputed specially to represent their people on this important occasion, and to raise their voices against a law passed and sustained in contempt of every precept of religion and morality.
"Parliament meets in total ignorance of the course which will be dictated to it by the leaders of that majority which has been obtained through the venality, the stupidity, or the indifference, of the handful of voters whom it is the fashion of finality scribes to designate the people. It meets to wait the prescription of the state physician, Sir Robert Peel. It meets without any certainty that the Sangrados, Stanley, Graham, Inglis, and others of their depletion school, will be content to prescribe anything short of copious bleedings and hot-water drenchings. It meets without knowing whether the graduated dose or the fixed number of vegetable pills will be most acceptable to patients beginning to be impatient, and with Peel advising one course and the Times another.
"The conference takes place, not to discover the cause of national distress, but how, most effectually, to destroy a law, which its members are already aware occasions more wide and more intense misery than all the other bad laws in the statute book put together. It meets not to debate whether a silk gown shall be worn in the pulpit, or to institute an inquisitorial investigation as to the authorship of some wishy-washy sketch book, but to declare that the landlord-law is contrary to the law of God; to add to the information the members already possess of its mischievous workings; to accumulate evidence of the distress it occasions; and unitedly to resolve on the course which they shall individually follow when they return to their respective constituents. It will indeed be, as The Anti-Bread-Tax Circular justly observes, 'a meeting which, viewed in relation to its object and the character of its members, has had no parallel in importance since the time of those great ecclesiastical councils which met to determine the faith of the early Christian world. In suspending, for a season, all arguments to the secular interests of our readers, we feel that we are only paying a proper homage to the tribunal before which our cause is about to be arraigned