MULTITUDE OF LAWS.

WE congratulate the country on the fate of the "Manure Bill," which, on the motion of Lord Holland, has been thrown by, as being of a nature too trifling and low for the consideration of the House of Peers, a motion for which his lordship will receive the thanks of every considerate man in the nation. The multitude of laws has been, and with good reason, reckoned amongst the greatest calamities of the French Revolution. In America, where there are eighteen different sets of lawgivers hard at work every year, from about Michaelmas to Lady-day, legislating upon trifles, has finally produced such indifference with respect to legislative decisions, that a new law is regarded as the mere lumber of a newspaper. Yet these lessons produce no effect. There are a set of well meaning men, in this country, who would pass laws for the regulating and restraining of every feeling of the human breast, and every motion of the human frame; they would bind us down, hair by hair, as the Lilliputians did Gulliver, till anon, when we awoke from our sleep, we should wonder by whom we had been enslaved.

PITT SYSTEM.

FROM the result of the elections in general, we are led to hope, that the race of " well-meaning men," of economists" and " philanthropists," will have experienced a considerable diminution. The disorder of this nation is not a fever, but a palsy. Any thing that will enliven is good. An actual rebellion would not be half so dangerous as that torpor, that total indifference, which has lately prevailed; the former might be quelled, but the latter, if it continue for any length of time, must end in radical destruction. The decline of life and of genius has ever been marked by a return to childish fancies and amusements; and really the last House of Commons, with its bills about "bull-baiting" and "rabbits' dung," exhibited a scene strongly resembling the last stages of mortality: a scene so disgusting, so humiliating to the nation, and so pleasing to its enemies, we hope never again to behold within the walls of St. Stephen. With the new parliament we hope to see also a new ministry; or, at least, an efficient and responsible ministry. We believe Mr. Addington to be a very honest man, but what is that? Honesty alone is not a recommendation for a footman, and shall it be for a first minister? He is not altogether destitute of talents as an orator, and even, perhaps, as a financier. In truth, he is what may be called a clever man. But he wants those great and commanding qualities, which mark the statesman, and which are at this time, more than ever, necessary to the preservation of the country. There are several persons in the ministry possessed of very good talents, nor are they at all deficient in point of industry and zeal; but they want weight, they want consequence, they want birth. At no period of our history were the powers of Government ever shared by so

few men of family. The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom have, with a very few exceptions, been thrust out of all public employments: this part of the aristocracy has been, in some measure, banished from the councils of the State. A race of merchants, and manufacturers, and bankers, and loan-jobbers, and contractors, have usurped their place, and the Government is very fast becoming what it must be expected to become in such hands. We think it probable that Mr. Pitt may again be Minister, and if he should, we hope he will perceive and avoid the evil consequences of surrounding himself with low and little men. In a minister who is himself a little man, it may be excused; but Mr. Pitt must always be great, even among the greatest. If Mr. Pitt should ever cast his eye upon this page, we are well persuaded he will not impute any selfish or malicious motive to the writer of it, and we therefore beg leave to tell him what many good men think, what is thought by many of his warmest admirers, but what he will never hear from any body but ourselves; and that is, that his preference of low churchmen has excited great jealousy and suspicion in those who are sincerely attached to the hierarchy, amongst whom are certainly to be reckoned a vast majority of the clergy; that the project, imputed to him, for rendering the clergy pensioners of the State, has greatly strengthened this suspicion; that, in short, the clergy do not regard him as a friend of the church. While Jacobinism was at our doors, while all was in jeopardy, the clergy supported him, because the existence of the Church and State was, in some sort, identified with his administration; but, now that the danger of commotion and rebellion is past, the minds of men will return to considerations of a nature somewhat more private, and, he may rest assured, that the attachment of this powerful body, powerful by their numbers, their talents, their character, and their local situations, is to be preserved by nothing short of unequivocal testimony, that he harbours no intention of invading or undermining the Established Church; to effect which was, as many persons believe, the sole object of the establishment of the Board of Agriculture, a belief which has been but too strongly corroborated by the proceedings and publications of that Board. We also beg leave to tell him, that his partiality for young and new men, for persons of his own creation, to the almost total exclusion of the old nobility and gentry, is a subject of complaint with a great number of very good men. In the present state of this country a minister might set the nobility and gentry at defiance, if the ill-will excited amongst them could be confined to their own breasts; but it cannot; the people, we mean the better sort of the people, resent the neglect and ill-treatment of those whom they have been, from their infancy, in the habit of respecting, more especially when the honours and favours due to them are conferred on persons of mean birth. Il vaut mieux qu'une cité périsse qu'un parvenu la gouverne, is an old Norman proverb; and though the age of chivalry is certainly gone, men yet retain soul enough to dislike the power that places them beneath an upstart. This upstart system naturally grew out of the peculiar circumstances under which Mr. Pitt came into power. It was adhered to, with some exceptions, from the first moment of his administration to the last: he appears never to have voluntarily and cordially given the hand to any thing great, whether of birth, character, or talent. Let us hope that, if he should again come into power, he will discard a system so injurious to the harmony and welfare of the State. Another error, which it is to be hoped Mr. Pitt will correct, is, that superabundant caution which prevents him from clearly and unequivocally

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stating his object and his resolution, which leaves the public mind for ever in a state of uncertainty, and which has, in so many instances, proved injurious to the country. To this very error, and to this error alone, the French Republic owes all its successes. The British Parliament never, at any one time, knew the real object of the late war; and how then should Europe know it? From an over-anxiety not to fail in any enterprise, the British Minister acted in a way in which he never could be said to undertake; and therefore he was never cordially joined, either at home or abroad. No man voluntarily embarks to be drifted to and fro by the tide, or to shift his course with every change of the wind; but, tell him his destination, and he cheerfully braves the toils and dangers of the sea. Mr. Pitt's forte lies in the domestic rather than the foreign department of politics. Having, from his very youth, had one eye constantly upon the Bank and the other upon the Parliament House, he has never been able to look abroad into the great world of politics. Without therefore at all detracting from the powers of his mind, we may venture to say, that he has discovered no great degree of penetration as to the conduct, the interests, and views of other nations. This is a science, however, which he must now apply himself to. The career on which he is now about to enter bears no resemblance to that which he has heretofore run. The present peace has laid the foundation for an entirely new distribution of power, the effects of which must be felt in a very few years. We must then have war; and it behoves him to consider how we shall be able to resist the confederacy which France can, and will, form against us. It behoves him to consider, in time, how the people of this country are again to be roused to arms. Husbanding our resources" will not save us. France has neither " commerce, capital, nor credit," yet, at only six weeks' notice, she ships off an army of thirty thousand men across the Atlantic. She has, in the whole, sent 45,000 men, and more are preparing. This shows that " commerce, credit, and capital," are not essentially necessary to the power of France; and we hope that Mr. Pitt will no longer regard a contest with that power as a war of finance." Men are very apt to attach the greatest degree of importance to that science which they best un lerstand: You may," said the currier, "think what you please about stone and oak, but if you have a mind "to have the town well fortified, take my word for it there is nothing "like leather." We have opposed money to a military spirit, and we have failed. Let the eloquence of Mr. Pitt be employed to create something more efficient than wealth; something that France cannot rob us of; then will he acquire a renown more lasting than brass and marble.

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THE ENGLISH PRESS AND BUONAPARTE.

NOTE BY THE EDITORS.]-The reader will be much entertained by a review of the part which Mr. COBBETT took at this period, when BuONAPARTE's insolence laid the foundation of that fixed hatred which our Government afterwards entertained for him, and when Mr. COBBETT's free lashings of the press, for their truckling to BUONAPARTE, added not a little to the envy and malignity which his previous independent career had inspired. The reader will see, from the Postscript to the following article, that Mr. COBBETT's caution to the

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"knights of the quill" (page 265) was not given without good reason. reproaches and threats of the French government-press soon forced the English Government to check the press of this country. The French Minister, M. Orto, by the express order of BUONAPARTE, applied to the English government to cause Mr. COBBETT to be prosecuted criminally for his satires on the great conqueror. —- Register, vol. iii., p. 102.-The Register was not the only medium adopted by Mr. COBBETT to make known his opinions; for at this time (February 1801) he started a monthly periodical, bearing a stamp, and the contents of which were in the French language. The publication was entitled LE MERCURE ANGLOIS DE COBBETT (Cobbett's English Mercury), and was intended for readers on the Continent.

To constitute a politician, it formerly required a large stock of infor mation, as well as a considerable share of acuteness; it was necessary to know the extent, population, and resources, warlike and pecuniary, of each of the principal States of Europe, and to obtain some acquaintance with the characters, interests, dispositions, and views of the different sovereigns, as well as of their respective ministers, and of the political parties in each State. This is no longer the case: the whole science is now reduced to the capacity of learning the will of Buonaparte That will is indeed, sometimes, very difficult to ascertain with precision; but when you have ascertained it, you may place perfect reliance on seeing its dictates obeyed. This remark, which we made more circumstantially on a former occasion, has been fully verified in the effects lately produced by Buonaparte's attack on the English Ministers and the English press. An article in the Moniteur of the 9th of August last contains the most infamous libel on the Ministers and Government of this country that perhaps ever was published in the world. It accuses the last Ministry of exciting the massacres of September, of causing the manufacturing cities to be destroyed, and of influencing the movements by which the King was brought to the scaffold. The present Ministers it accuses of hiring the pages of the English newspaper called the Times, and of employing them to circulate the grossest calumnies against the rulers of France. It accuses them of receiving French robbers and assassins, of harbouring them at Jersey, and of sending them to make predatory incursions, to rob, murder, and to burn houses, on the coasts of France. It accuses them of giving their special protection to the person whom it chooses to regard as the inventor of the infernal machine, and this, too, as a recompense for that invention. To cap this climax of most impudent and atrocious falsehoods, it insinuates, that if the infernal machine had succeeded in killing the First Consul, the assassin would have been created`a Knight of the Garter.*

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As to hiring the proprietor of the Times, we shall say but little. to have hired such a man merits everlasting suspicion and reproach; and, to say the truth, we believe that the Times is, to this moment, as much in the pay of Government as the True Briton is. But while we

See the translation of this article of the Moniteur, Register, vol. ii. p. 179.To show to what an extent we were insulted by the Government of BuONAPARTE at this time, Mr. COBBETT observes (Register, vol. ii. p. 857):-" There is, in "one of the picture-rooms at Versailles, a design of a monument to the memory "of Robejot and Bonnier, the two French plenipotentiaries, who were assassi"nated in the neighbourhood of Rastadt; and upon a pedestal represented in "this picture are these words: Ils furent égorgés par des assassins soudoyés par le "Gouvernement Anglois." (They were murdered by assassins in the pay of the English Government.)-ED.

candidly confess our belief that the articles in the Times, which have given such offence to Buonaparte, were, if not dictated, approved of by the Ministers, we are far from acknowledging that those articles were not true and proper to be published. There are, in this country, hundreds and thousands of traitors, whose whole time is spent in endeavours to produce the subversion of the Government; and is it not the duty of Ministers to endeavour to counteract them? And how can they do this more effectually, than by showing the people what has been produced by a subversion of government in France? By drawing a comparison between the monarchy and the republic, between Louis XVI. and Buonaparte, between the wooden shoes of 1789 and the fetters of 1802 ?

It is not, however, for the sake of exposing the impudence and insolence of the upstart Corsican that we have introduced these remarks, but for the purpose of showing how completely he has brought our Government to his feet. And here we must beg leave to premise that the newspapers called the True Briton and the Sun are, in some sort, the property of the Ministers. They are, at any rate, as absolutely at the command as the Moniteur is at the command of Buonaparte. This being acknowledged (and we believe nobody will deny it), the language of these two papers will enable the world to judge of the effect which the threats of the Consul have produced on the British Ministry.

As the menacing Moniteur arrived late at night, the article of which we have been speaking was, of course, inserted in the True Briton, before the editor had an opportunity of receiving his instructions from the Treasury; and as the attack on the Ministers (particularly Mr. Pitt) was inserted, it was thought necessary to insert also something by way of defence. This defence was not, indeed, very spirited; but it contradicted the falsehoods of the Moniteur, and took the liberty to remind Buonaparte, that, if England did really hire the assassins of September, he would do well to ask Fouché and other persons concerned in the massacres, and now in the Government, what became of the wages. Before the next morning, however, the Ministers had had time to convey their instructions, and the tone of the True Briton instantly changed. We shall copy this second article at length :

"The more we reflect upon the article which we had yesterday occasion to "animadvert upon, the more we see grounds for supposing that it could not "have been inserted in the Moniteur with the knowledge and consent of the French "government." [Not so much as a hint of this sort was given the day before.] "We are the more inclined to indulge in this opinion, when we recollect that "some time ago an article appeared in the same paper, in which justice was, in "some degree, done to the talents and virtues of the late Minister. We can "hardly suppose it possible that the men who thus had magnanimity enough to pay just homage to one who had so lately been their enemy, would condescend "to authorize the publication, in the face of Europe, and of the civilized world, "of assertions at once so mean and so groundless. But even if the French "government chose, which we believe improbable, to vent its spleen against the man who conciliates the admiration of all nations, and must continue to be that " of all posterity, while civilized society has existence, why should it indulge in in"vectives against the present Ministers of this country? men who have esta "blished peace between the two nations with a candour and sincerity of conduct which must entitle them to the respect and esteem of all mankind,-who have produced a reconciliation at which both nations so warmly and sincerely rejoiced, and which it is so much the interest of both to render complete and per"manent. For the expression of any hostile sentiments, we are certain there can "be no reasonable grounds, and therefore it is that we are bound to believe any "member of the French government incapable of entertaining it. The article

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