For ourselves, we hope that Lord Stanley will take office and that Parliament will be dissolved. We are certain that there exists in the country a strong revival of Protectionist feeling. Even the manufacturers begin to experience the necessity of it. The country shopkeepers are falling with farmers. The mercantile navy is in a state of mutiny. All the crochets and the falsehoods in the world cannot render us blind to distress, and so rapid is the advance of ruin that it carries a warning and a rattle in the very abruptness of its approach. It is indeed a crisis, and he is a bold man who will face it. On the one side is the confusion of the mighty gala to which we stand pledged; on the other is a religious conflict. No juggling sleight of hand will meet the emergency. No soft-spoken Peel will avail; no paltry saving of finance. A Minister must come forward, more like a dictator than a party-leader. Is this possible? All we can say is, that if it be not, the country is ruined, and, therefore, it is well worth the trial. A strong and frank appeal to the sense of the nation might do wonders.

A total alteration in our system of currency—a graduated tax upon property-a low, fixed duty on corn—a grand system of emigration-the abandonment of frantic expense, such as a Caffre war and a negro blockade the placing the Church on a cheaper footing-and the incorporation of the flower of our colonies, with the immediate reduction of pauperism and the employment of convict labour-such are the measures which England will still recognise; because they are sound and honest and based on broad and true principles. If the country be not yet ripe for Lord Stanley, perhaps the best thing it could submit to would be the short-lived degradation of a "gent" Ministry. Let us have Bright and Cobden, and hurry on the catas

trophe. A crisis is better than a decline—as small-pox is less to be apprehended than a galloping consumption. We say this with an inclination to be ironical. Imagine such a man as Cobden at the head of affairs-the climax of absurdity and the holiday-train of vulgar ruin! These are no stern sectarians-no men whose principles dignify upstarts and stamp novices with the die of action. Poor, puny, pertinacious, notorious, sour-milk-and-water demagogues, ye would destroy your country, without even the dignity which may attend wrong, or the respectability which may accompany a great theoretical mistake!

We have heard it rumoured that Lord Stanley has actually taken upon himself to form a Cabinet. If he have done so, it must be no "Liberal" amalgamation, no Peelite combination. Aut Cæsar aut nullus, he must put a new aspect on matters, or, after a short career, he will really make way for the desperate devices of the rank Free-traders, and the Government of England will be actually prostituted ́ to political "gentism." The miserable Papal measure of Lord John Russell has increased the insolence of the Roman priest, who sees fear in concession, and is only capable of estimating a blow in the face for its true value. The misery of half measures has received a timely warning. Stanley has been called the Rupert of debate, let him show himself the Cromwell of action. For Lord John Russell, he has proved himself to be but a fluctuating dwarf between experience and innovation. He has met with the fate of all mock Liberals. With the present parliament we must reiterate that we believe nothing can be done. It is a dead weight upon the country, which has now had some experience of Free-trade; and, if we mistake not, even an extension of the franchise will only give a more general

Lord

voice to the necessity of a return to those principles which once made the country great and prosperous. We shall give farther scope, next week, to our ideas of the resources which Great Britain possesses for the happy maintenance of all who are born upon her soil. She has land for her millions within fourteen days of Liverpool; steamers to convey them; and a loan might be so arranged as to repay itself from the sweat of their brow in a short space of time. This would be a greater triumph than a forcing-frame of industry, and a more healthy out-of-door process altogether. When this is done, and our workhouses and prisons are closed, it will be time to cry Free-trade with the world, and we shall not then fear the cosmopolitan race; no, not on any ground that may be marked out for it from Borneo to California. FEBRUARY 26TH, 1851.

HOW THE GREAT EXHIBITION BECAME

INTERNATIONAL.

Ir may be interesting to trace the progress of this national calamity. We know how great things originate from small. The story of the nail that was wanting to the horse-shoe, and consequent destruction of an empire, must be familiar to such of our readers as are old enough to have been young in the good old days of nursery rhymes and sayings. Here it will be as well to remind our readers that we only condemn the "Great Exhibition" because it is international. We are not opposed to science and art. We condemn King Bomba and the Pope because they are-in addition to their execrable tyranny. We do not, it is true, consider that the advancement of science generates happiness by an egg

hatching process, or that it purifies the human heart by any new invention under the sun. We believe that even steam and printing have their drawbacks. But we are inclined to look, on the whole, with wonder and admiration on every development of human skill and cunning, whether displayed in mechanism or discovery, in science, chemistry, or the arts. Therefore, we repudiate the notion of being anti-progressionists, except when the age runs frantically away from the experience of all antiquity, from the wisdom of our forefathers, from honesty, faith, and honour. Then, indeed, we may indulge in a sigh for "stage-coaches," mercantile probity, British bravery, and all that which the Times loves to ridicule under the sweeping denomination of "Protection." Still, the great point with us is this :-We should have been proud of a British National Exhibition of Arts and Industry. No injury could have accrued from this; and we cannot deny that much good might have been done. Excuse us for using the word "British." It has been ridiculed by a daily journal-the same, we think, which stated that all Barclay and Perkins' draymen were women-floggers towards their own wives! However, we are British in our sympathies, and we cannot help it. We lean towards G. F. Young rather than Cobden, from impulse and sentiment, as well as reasoning and much-abused "statistics," which last phrase means, in Free-trade language, a lie put in the disguise of exports, imports, and figures.

Let us now come to the question. How was the internationality of this Exhibition, which is to do so much good or so much harm-which at any rate is to do something— how was it concocted? In what eclipse of reason or the sun did this notion seize upon the fanciful ingenuity of men; and, having taken hold of that, how was it forced

upon John Bull, nolens volens? What was the secret? At a meeting of the Society of Arts, in 1845, if we mistake not, Mr. FRANCIS WHISHAW proposed to His Royal Highness Prince Albert, on the steps of the building in the Adelphi, the nucleus of the plan for an Exhibition. In 1850, Prince Albert is the originator of that scheme, with the notable addition of the admission of the world to England's banquet. At a meeting held in 1849, the question was incidentally put in the Adelphi-"Shall we admit foreign goods, or not?" The vote of two or three obscure individuals decided it.

"Thus are kingdoms lost or won."

Shortly after, the deputation waited on Prince Albert in the Highlands of Scotland, and the Prince, a general lover of science, but who does not probably dig deep beneath the surface of political agency, was delighted therewith. It suited the active individuals, who now found themselves invested with the importance for which they laboured, to honour the Prince, and the Prince was accordingly honoured. So, instead of a Baker-street Bazaar affair, or a building that should contain London, Paisley, Manchester, Birmingham, and the Colonies, we are saddled with a Greenhouse for all the world-in the midst of a sea of troubles, which, sooth to say, no politician of the day likes to encounter, save Bright and Cobden, and they would scale Heaven-dwarfs as they are in place of Titans. Even Ambition shrinks from the helm. All this was done without deliberation; without the high sanction of Parliament; without counsel, save that of Brown, Jones, and Robinson— "all honourable men," but rather pushing withal-without one fair auspice for its success save the flattering smiles of the flattered Consort of her Majesty's serene throne.