durable.  One of the arguments most frequently urged against the Reform Bill was that, under a system of popular representation, men whose presence in the House of Commons was necessary to the conducting of public business might often find it impossible to find seats.  Should this inconvenience ever be felt, there cannot be the slightest difficulty in devising and applying a remedy.  But those who threatened us with this evil ought to have remembered that, under the old system, a great man called to power at a great crisis by the voice of the whole nation was in danger of being excluded, by an aristocratical cabal from that House of which he was the most distinguished ornament.

The most important event of this short administration was the trial of Byng.  On that subject public opinion is still divided.  We think the punishment of the Admiral altogether unjust and absurd.  Treachery, cowardice, ignorance amounting to what lawyers have called crassa ignorantia, are fit objects of severe penal inflictions.  But Byng was not found guilty of treachery, of cowardice, or of gross ignorance of his profession.  He died for doing what the most loyal subject, the most intrepid warrior, the most experienced seaman, might have done.  He died for an error in judgment, an error such as the greatest commanders, Frederick, Napoleon, Wellington, have often committed, and have often acknowledged.  Such errors are not proper objects of punishment, for this reason, that the punishing of such errors tends not to prevent them, but to produce them.  The dread of an ignominious death may stimulate sluggishness to exertion, may keep a traitor to his standard, may prevent a coward from running away, but it has no tendency to bring out those qualities which enable men to form prompt and judicious decisions in great emergencies.  The best marksman may be expected to fail when the apple which is to be his mark is set on his child’s head.  We cannot conceive anything more likely to deprive an officer of his self-possession at the time when he most needs it than the knowledge that, if, the judgment of his superiors should not agree with his, he will he executed with every circumstance of shame.  Queens, it has often been said, run far greater risk in childbed than private women, merely because their medical attendants are more anxious.  The surgeon who attended Marie Louise was altogether unnerved by his emotions.  “Compose yourself,” said Bonaparte; “imagine that you are assisting a poor girl in the Faubourg Saint Antoine.”  This was surely a far wiser course than that of the Eastern king in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, who proclaimed that the physicians who failed to cure his daughter should have their heads chopped off.  Bonaparte knew mankind well; and, as he acted towards this surgeon, he acted towards his officers.  No sovereign was ever so indulgent to mere errors of judgment; and it is certain that no sovereign ever had in his service so many military men fit for the highest commands.