besotted Liverpool. Let awakened Liverpool shout to cowardly and goose-ridden Manchester; Manchester to London,—and all together to England and the world. We shall then have an union, not in name only, but in reality,—an union that will have, and do the right, and nothing but the right. Repudiate at once, and for ever, the idea of a fixed duty. Every shilling per quarter would be a direct tax of four millions sterling, per annum, on the productive classes of Englishmen. Treat not, then, for graduated iniquity; put not in the banns for a new marriage of reptile-spawning fraud and time; but with the word Restitution, pronounced in thunder, startle your oppressors from their hideous dream of injustice and ruin made permanent."
The call was unheeded trade was moderately prosperous, employment easy to be had, and provisions at a moderate price; and so the year 1834 drifted on quietly, men thinking it would be time enough to complain of their liability to famine when the famine came. In the mean time, King William, if we are to believe with Mr. Roebuck that he was adverse to the reform which had been effected, and fearful that more might follow, was watching his opportunity to rid himself of the whig ministry. In November Lord Melbourne was dismissed, and the Duke of Wellington was installed as sole minister, until Sir Robert Peel should arrive from Italy to form a new reform-resisting administration. At the close of the year Parliament was dissolved, and the country, so far as it was represented, had to choose whether it would support men who might be considered as progressive, though with rather too much caution, or permit the accession to power of those who, if they did not take backward steps., would determinedly resist all onward movement. At the general election, Manchester again returned Mr. Thomson and Mr. Philips, not unopposed, but opposed by a feeble candidate supported by a feeble party,
