taxes, must originate with them. By their power of withholding supplies, they have a strong control over the executive; and by the constitution they enjoy all the privileges necessary to the full and free discharge of their high functions. Though new laws may be proposed by any member of either house, the consent of all the three constituent parts of the legislature is necessary to make laws binding on the subject; and though any part of the legislature may, by withholding its consent, prevent the enactment of a law, it requires the agreement of all the three to repeal an existing statute. 66 Thus," as observed by Blackstone, "the true excellence of the British government consists in all its parts forming a mutual check upon each other. The legislature cannot abridge the executive power of any rights which it has by law, without its own consent. The commons are a check upon the nobility, and the nobility are a check upon the commons, by the mutual privilege of rejecting what the other has resolved; while the king is a check upon both; which preserves the executive power from encroachment. And this very executive power is again checked, and kept within due bounds, by the two houses, through the privilege they have of inquiring into, impeaching, and punishing the conduct, not indeed of the king (which would destroy his constitutional independence), but of his evil and pernicious counsellors." ENGLAND PAST AND PRESENT. Or a truth, whosoever had, with the bodily eye, seen Hengist and Horsa mooring on the mud-beach of Thanet, on that spring morning of the year 449, and then, with the spiritual eye, looked forward to New York, Calcutta, Sydney Cove, across the ages and the oceans, and thought what Wellingtons, Washingtons, Shakspeares, Miltons, Watts, Arkwrights, William Pitts, and Davie Crocketts had to issue from that business, and do their several taskworks so, he would have said these leather boots of Hengist's had a kind of cargo in them-a genealogic mythus, superior to any in the old Greek and not a mythus either, but every fibre of it fact. CARLYLE. PLACE before your eyes the island of Britain in the reign of Alfred-its unpierced woods, its wide morasses and dreary heaths, its blood-stained and desolate shores, its untaught and scanty population-behold the monarch listening now to a Bede and now to John Erigena; and then see the same realm a mighty empire, full of motion, full of books, where the cottar's son, twelve years old, has read more than archbishops of yore, and possesses the opportunity of reading more than our Alfred himself. COLERIDGE. THE history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is the history of a constant movement in the public mind, of a constant change in the institutions of a great society. We see that society, at the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most degraded nations of the East now are. We see it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners. We see a strong distinction of caste separating the victorious Norman from the vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the population in a state of personal slavery. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge. In the course of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw-have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe-have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents, of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo-have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together-have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical-have produced a literature which may boast of works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us-have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies -have speculated with exquisite subtlety on the operations of the human mind-have been the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the career of political improvement. MACAULAY. If nature has denied to Britain the fruitful vine, the fragrant myrtle, and the beautiful climate, she has also exempted her from the parching drought, the deadly siroc, and the frightful tornado. If our soil is poor and churlish, and our skies cold and frowning, the serpent never lurks within the one, nor the plague within the other. If our mountains are bleak and barren, they have at least nursed within their bosoms a race of men whose industry and intelligence supply a more inexhaustible fund of wealth than all the mines of Mexico and Hindostan. If other nations furnish us with the materials of our manufactures, ours are the skill and industry that have enhanced their value a thousandfold; ours are the capital and enterprise that have applied the great inventions of Watt and Arkwright, and made the ascendency of this little island be felt in the remotest corners of the world; ours, in a word, are those institutions, civil, political, and religious, that have made us the envy of surrounding nations and raised us to a pinnacle of greatness from which nothing but intestine foes can ever thrust us down. M'DIARMID. WE rest in the confident belief, that England, in despite of her burdens and her disadvantages, will maintain her commercial pre-eminence among the nations of the world, provided only she can also maintain, or rather also elevate, the moral and spiritual life of her own children within her borders. Her material greatness has grown out of her social and religious soundness, and out of the power and integrity of individual character. It is well to talk of our geographical position; but this does not alone make a nation great in industrial pursuits. There is our mineral wealth; not so much, probably, greater than that of other lands, as earlier extracted and employed; and whence proceeded that earlier extraction and application? There is our capital, the fruit of our accumulated industry; why does this exceed the capital of other nations, but because there was more industry, and therefore more accumulation? There are our inventions; they did not fall upon us from the clouds like the Ancilia of Rome; they are the index and the fruit of powerful and indefatigable thought applied to their subjectmatter. It is in the creature MAN, such as God has made him in this island, that the moving cause of the commercial pre-eminence of the country is to be found; and his title to that pre-eminence is secure, if he can in himself but be preserved, or even rescued from degeneracy. GLADSTONE. ADVERSITY. THE path of sorrow, and that path alone, COWPER. BEHOLD this vine: I found it a wild tree, whose wanton strength Had swollen into irregular twigs And bold excrescences, And spent itself in leaves and little rings-- Wasting the sap and strength That should have given forth fruit. But when I pruned the tree, Then it grew temperate in its vain expanse Of useless leaves, and knotted, as thou seest, The hand that wisely wounded it. In wisdom and in mercy, Heaven inflicts, How visitations of calamity Affect the pious soul, 'tis shown ye there! Look yonder at that cloud, which, through the sky Sailing alone, doth cross in her career The rolling moon! I watched it as it came, And deemed the deep opaque would blot her beams; But, melting like a wreath of snow, it hangs In folds of wavy silver round, and clothes The orb with richer beauties than her own; Then, passing, leaves her in her light serene. SOUTHEY. WITHIN this leaf, to every eye Wouldst thou its secret strength unbind? Sweet as Arabia's spicy wind. In this dull stone, so poor and bare This leaf? this stone? It is thy heart! BISHOP WILBERFORCE. U |