us are for our good.”  These sentences contain, in fact, the whole explanation of the mystery.  The conflict of the seventeenth century was maintained by the Parliament against the Crown.  The conflict which commenced in the middle of the eighteenth century, which still remains undecided, and in which our children and grandchildren will probably be called to act or to suffer, is between a large portion of the people on the one side, and the Crown and the Parliament united on the other.

The privileges of the House of Commons, those privileges which, in 1642, all London rose in arms to defend, which the people considered as synonymous with their own liberties, and in comparison of which they took no account of the most precious and sacred principles of English jurisprudence, have now become nearly as odious as the rigours of martial law.  That power of committing which the people anciently loved to see the House of Commons exercise, is now, at least when employed against libellers, the most unpopular power in the Constitution.  If the Commons were to suffer the Lords to amend money-bills, we do not believe that the people would care one straw about the matter.  If they were to suffer the Lords even to originate money-bills, we doubt whether such a surrender of their constitutional rights would excite half so much dissatisfaction as the exclusion of strangers from a single important discussion.  The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.  The publication of the debates, a practice which seemed to the most liberal statesmen of the old school full of danger to the great safeguards of public liberty, is now regarded by many persons as a safeguard tantamount, and more than tantamount, to all the rest together.

Burke, in a speech on parliamentary reform which is the more remarkable because it was delivered long before the French Revolution, has described, in striking language, the change in public feeling of which we speak.  “It suggests melancholy reflections,” says he, “in consequence of the strange course we have long held, that we are now no longer quarrelling about the character, or about the conduct of men, or the tenor of measures; but we are grown out of humour with the English Constitution itself; this is become the object of the animosity of Englishmen.  This constitution in former days used to be the envy of the world; it was the pattern for politicians; the theme of the eloquent; the meditation of the philosopher in every part of the world.  As to Englishmen, it was their pride, their consolation.  By it they lived, and for it they were ready to die.  Its defects, if it had any, were partly covered by partiality, and partly borne by prudence.  Now all its excellencies are forgot, its faults are forcibly dragged into day, exaggerated by every artifice of misrepresentation.  It is despised and rejected of men; and every device and invention of ingenuity or idleness is set up in opposition, or in preference to it.”  We neither adopt nor condemn the language of reprobation which the great orator here employs.  We call him only as a witness to the fact.  That the revolution of public feeling which he described was then in progress is indisputable; and it is equally indisputable, we think, that it is in progress still.