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States will certainly be unable to obviate. The proceedings of the southern states on the Tariff question, and the principles avowed by the Nullifiers, afford sufficient proof of this assertion. In the year 1833, the following sentence was uttered before the Senate of the United States, by the Vice President Calhoun, the head of the Nullifying party in the south.

"The constitution is a compact to which the states were parties in their sovereign capacity; now, whenever a compact is entered into by parties which acknowledge no tribunal above their authority to decide in the last resort, each of them has a right to judge for itself in relation to the nature, extent, and obligations of the instrument.

"It is evident," adds our author, "that a similar doctrine destroys the very basis of the Federal constitution, and brings back all the evils of the old confederation, from which the Americans were supposed to have had a safe deliverance."

But notwithstanding the inherent weakness of judicial power, applied to political purposes, the judicial institutions of the United States amply deserve the minute attention which M. de Tocqueville has devoted to them. In a social point of view, the members of the legal profession exercise a strong anti-democratic, if not aristocratic influence: in a political point of view, the courts of the United States are invested with a degree of authority which they do not possess in any other country.

"The government of democracy is favourable to the political power of lawyers; for when the wealthy, the noble, and the prince are excluded from the government, they are sure to occupy the highest stations, in their own right, as it were, since they are the only men of information and sagacity beyond the sphere of the people who can be the object of the popular choice. If, then, they are led by their tastes to combine with the aristocracy and to support the crown, they are naturally brought into contact with the people by their interests. They like the government of democracy, without participating in its propensities, and without imitating its weaknesses, whence they derive a two-fold authority from it and over it. The people in democratic states does not mistrust the members of the legal profession, because it is well known that they are interested in serving the popular cause; and it listens to them without irritation, because it does not attribute to them any sinister designs. The object of lawyers is not, indeed, to overthrow the institutions of democracy, but they constantly endeavour to give it an impulse which diverts it from its real tendency, by means which are foreign to its nature. Lawyers belong to the people by birth and Interest, to the aristocracy by habit and by taste, and they may be looked upon as the natural bond and connecting link of the two great classes of society.

"The profession of the law is the only aristocratic element which can be amalgamated without violence with the natural elements of democracy, and which can be advantageously and permanently combined with them. I am not unac

quainted with the defects which are inherent in the character of that body of men; but without this admixture of lawyer-like sobriety with the democratic principle, I question whether democratic institutions could long be maintained; and I cannot believe that a republic could exist at the present time if the influence of lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people.”—(Vol. II., pp. 180—1.)

It may indeed be doubted, whether this supposititious aristocratic influence, which our author attributes to the lawyers of America, is not imbued with most of the prejudices of aristocracy, without its dignity, and its exclusiveness without its refinement. They may act as a check upon the mutability of the democratic element, but they are too needy to be safe guardians of property, and too much interested in the acquirement of immediate power, to oppose the evil tendencies on which that power is based.

The courts of justice are, however, the most powerful organs by which the lawyers are enabled to control the democracy. The American judge is armed with the extraor dinary power, of declaring a law to be unconstitutional; and of annulling any enactment, on the ground of its being opposed to the spirit of the fundamental law of the union. This judicial censorship is, indeed, solely applicable to the particular cases which are brought before the courts of law; but if its action be private, it is not the less sure; and within these limits it invests the only authority, which is, comparatively speaking, independent of the people, with a salutary control over the tyranny of popular assemblies. It is true that, in some of the states, the judicial functionaries are not independent of popular election; and in most of them, innovations have been made, which threaten to paralyse the influence of the legal profession. There, as in every point of the American constitutions, the democratic principle is still at work, like a swollen torrent, or an angry sea, beating against the dams which restrain its encroachments, and levelling the barriers which oppose its progress.

With this picture before our eyes, what conclusions are we to draw from the unstable work of American democracy? Are we to admit, with M. de Tocqueville, that the spread of equality is a necessary event, willed by Providence, and sanctioned by time-believing, with him, that purely

democratic institutions may yet be invented, to serve as a broad and solid basis for the government of human societies; and acknowledging that," although the Americans have not "resolved the problem, they furnish useful data to those who "undertake the task?" Or are we to regard the changes that the world is undergoing at the present day, as some great and mysterious transition, which will furnish the means of attaining some remote good, still undiscernible to ourselves and our generation?

It is impossible, we conceive, to observe the intelligence and the energy, the industry and the accumulating wealth, of our own country, without rejecting the theory of a fixed and immutable constitution-without repudiating the doctrine of "final measures," as one which seeks to confine the powers bestowed by a wise and beneficent Providence, within the narrow limits established by the ignorance and selfishness of man. Therefore, we consider the information afforded by our author, as most important for our guidance, in the changes which are taking place in our own institutions.

Monsieur de Tocqueville attributes the present prosperity of the American States, chiefly to the local advantages they possess, and to the fact, that the habits and manners of the people, originally Republican, have, from the earliest settlement of the country, been sustained and confirmed by democratic institutions. Notwithstanding these adventitious elements of success, there are revelations in our author's pages, which must make us pause, before we admit either the permanent character of the American system, or concede that it is best calculated to secure civil and religious liberty.

With reference to ourselves, we are bound to remember, that we possess not the territorial advantages of the Americans -that our habits and manners, so far from having been moulded on a Republican model, have been formed under a monarchical government. We fully participate in the indignation felt, at the obstacles interposed by the House of Lords, to the progress of constitutional reform; but it is the part of an intelligent people, to distinguish between the value of an institution, and the delinquencies of some of the individuals who compose it. They may have grown up under an

exploded system. They may be influenced by selfishness, urged by disappointment, or prompted by fear, by ignorance, or by passion. In a few years, compared with the age of a nation, they will have passed away, and their places will be supplied by men, who, educated under a reformed political system, will neither scorn the obligations of society, nor reject the claims of public opinion.

Means may even be devised to remove or mitigate the evil, without this delay, but if the institution itself be destroyed, it may never be replaced; and upon its ruins must necessarily arise that purely democratic form of government, which— unsuited, as it may prove, to the present habits and manners of the people, and not adapted, perhaps, under any circumstances, to a redundant population within a confined spacemay bring with it anarchy and terrorism, instead of that partial success, which the confirmed manners, and the local advantages of the Americans, have shown to be not inconsistent, for a time, with equality and democracy.

We are free to own, that, as constitutional reformers, we look to the fulfilment of our hopes as men, and our duties as citizens, by the means and not by the subversion of the institutions of our country. We would remove all such obstacles to the truth as we can remove; and then we are content to watch and wait; never forgetting that the triumph of truth is that of justice, and that justice in matters of opinion is tolerance.

"Time's golden thigh

Upholds the flowery body of the earth
In sacred harmony, and every birth
Of men and actions makes legitimate

When used aright:-the use of Time is Fate."

328

ARTICLE XIV.

Reports from the Select Committees appointed to inquire into the nature, character, extent, and tendency, of Orange Lodges, Associations, or Societies, in Ireland; with the Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix. Ordered by the House of Commons to be Printed.

Report from the Select Committee appointed to inquire into the origin, nature, extent, and tendency, of Orange Institutions in Great Britain and the Colonies; with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index. Ordered by the House of Commons to be Printed.

THE Orange Societies had, previously to the last session of parliament, been occasionally the subject of animadversion in the House of Commons. In 1813, Mr. Charles Wynn moved for an inquiry into their nature, and represented them as equally illegal and pernicious. Lord Castlereagh deprecated their existence, but, with his characteristic lubricity, slipped through the question. In the year 1827 a debate, regarding their legality, took place, upon a motion by Mr. Brownlow, with respect to a procession at Lisburne. It appeared in the course of the discussion that Mr. Joy, the present Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer in Ireland, an avowed Conservative, had, as a law officer of the crown, given an opinion, expressly stating Orange Lodges to be illegal; and that Lord Manners, the then Chancellor, had, in a letter to Mr. Jones, a magistrate, concurred in that view. Notwithstanding the admissions made by the government respecting the character of the Orange confederacy, it was not considered necessary to take any decided steps for its suppression; nor indeed, for a considerable time, was any very strong interest excited in the public mind, in reference to the proceedings of the Irish Orangemen ; who, although connived at by Tory governments, had not been openly enlisted as their auxiliaries. Mention was often made in the English newspapers of outrages committed in the north of Ireland; but as the Catholics and Orangemen differed as essentially in their facts as in their opinions, and, with a reciprocal strenuousness of asseveration, charged each other with

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