The political state of England became agitated as the time drew near when the new Protector was to be elected.  This event excited the more interest, since it was the current report, that if the popular candidate (Ryland) should be chosen, the question of the abolition of hereditary rank, and other feudal relics, would come under the consideration of parliament.  Not a word had been spoken during the present session on any of these topics.  Every thing would depend upon the choice of a Protector, and the elections of the ensuing year.  Yet this very silence was awful, shewing the deep weight attributed to the question; the fear of either party to hazard an ill-timed attack, and the expectation of a furious contention when it should begin.

But although St. Stephen’s did not echo with the voice which filled each heart, the newspapers teemed with nothing else; and in private companies the conversation however remotely begun, soon verged towards this central point, while voices were lowered and chairs drawn closer.  The nobles did not hesitate to express their fear; the other party endeavoured to treat the matter lightly.  “Shame on the country,” said Ryland, “to lay so much stress upon words and frippery; it is a question of nothing; of the new painting of carriage-pannels and the embroidery of footmen’s coats.”

Yet could England indeed doff her lordly trappings, and be content with the democratic style of America?  Were the pride of ancestry, the patrician spirit, the gentle courtesies and refined pursuits, splendid attributes of rank, to be erased among us?  We were told that this would not be the case; that we were by nature a poetical people, a nation easily duped by words, ready to array clouds in splendour, and bestow honour on the dust.  This spirit we could never lose; and it was to diffuse this concentrated spirit of birth, that the new law was to be brought forward.  We were assured that, when the name and title of Englishman was the sole patent of nobility, we should all be noble; that when no man born under English sway, felt another his superior in rank, courtesy and refinement would become the birth-right of all our countrymen.  Let not England be so far disgraced, as to have it imagined that it can be without nobles, nature’s true nobility, who bear their patent in their mien, who are from their cradle elevated above the rest of their species, because they are better than the rest.  Among a race of independent, and generous, and well educated men, in a country where the imagination is empress of men’s minds, there needs be no fear that we should want a perpetual succession of the high-born and lordly.  That party, however, could hardly yet be considered a minority in the kingdom, who extolled the ornament of the column, “the Corinthian capital of polished society;” they appealed to prejudices without number, to old attachments and young hopes; to the expectation of thousands who might one day become peers; they set up as a scarecrow, the spectre of all that was sordid, mechanic and base in the commercial republics.