tions deemed essential to the proper discharge of the duties attached to them. Of these conditions and qualifications the nation is to judge; and when it has fixed, according to its best views of public utility, the terms on which each public office shall be conferred, and the description of persons to whom it shall be entrusted, no man who is destitute of the civil qualifications prescribed, has any plea for complaining of injustice in being precluded from filling the post. It would be as unreasonable in a person thus disqualified, to contend that he is treated with injustice in not being permitted to be an elector, as it would be to affirm that he is unjustly treated in not being permitted to be king. The king and the elector are alike public officers and the nation has the same right to appoint citizens of a particular description to choose members of parliament, as it has to appoint a particular family to occupy the throne." In a subsequent part of the same chapter, the author considers the expediency of the limitation of the right of voting for members of parliament; and concludes with the following ob. servations: "The grand object to be had in view in imparting the elective franchise is, to secure, as far as may be possible, the choice of proper representatives. By this consideration alone the number and description of electors ought to be regulated. And if this consideration undeniably requires, on the one hand, that the whole number of electors in the kingdom should bear an adequate proportion to the amount of the inhabitants, it seems equally to require, on the other, that the right of voting should be confined to men competent and

likely to discharge the trust com mitted to them, in a manner condu. cive to the public good. If we reflect on the uninformed condition of multitudes in the lower ranks of

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society, on the blind deference th which they commonly pay to the an will of their immediate superiors; he on the temptations they are under of being corrupted by bribes; on the facility with which they may be deluded by artful misrepresentations and inflammatory harrangues; on the difficulty of preventing confusion and riots in popular assemblies, spreading over the face of a whole kingdom; on the rapidity with which tumults excited by design or accident in one assembly would be communicated by contagion to another, until the country would be agitated with general convalsions; if we reflect on the dangers to be dreaded from these and other circumstance which would attend the plea of universal suffrage, we shall probably see great reason to rejoice that the elective right is li mited under the British constitution. And we are not to forget; that if any inconveniences and hardships are to be apprehended, in conse- ! quence of limiting it, they are necessarily much diminished, if not altogether removed, by the very small share of property requisite to procure the privilege of voting for county members.

From chapter the third, which treats of the duties of the sovereign, we shall make no selection; not that we think it inferior in excellence to the other parts of the work; but as we cannot quote from every part, we would wish to conform to the intention of the worthy and patriotic author, of extending to the widest circles the benefit of his labours.

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labours. We shall pass over like wise the fourth chapter for the same reason, observing only that Mr. Gisborne contests in it, but we do not think with success, the claim of the sovereign to natural, perpetual, and indefeasible allegiance; though he is supported in his opinion by Sir W. Blackstone, and other writers of high repute.

The chapter on the duties of peers has a very just and important observation on the custom of voting by proxy.

"A considerate nobleman will make a very sparing and cautious use of his privilege of voting by proxy; and will be scrupulous in receiving the proxy of another peer. Indeed, the idea of a person giving his vote in the decision of a question which he has not heard debated, and may never have considered, in enacting or rejecting a bill with the nature and object of which he is E unacquainted, at a time too, perhaps, when he is in another quarter of the globe, and unable to learn the present posture of affairs and circumstances either at home or in the rest of Europe, is so plainly repugnant to common sense, is capable of being so easily and grossly I perverted to the manœuvres of private interest, or of party, and so nearly resembles the Popish plan of putting one man's conscience into the hands of another, that the surrender of this privilege would, apparently, be at once honourable to the house of lords, and beneficial to the nation."

Among the benefits resulting from the house of commons, as it is at present constituted, the following deserves to be recited from the sixth chapter:

"It furnishes the means of a paVOL. XXXVII.

tient and safe discussion of political grievances and popular discontents, before they are grown to such a magnitude as neither to be tolerated with safety to the state, nor removed without the risk of dangerous convulsions. The beneficial effects of a representative house of commons, in this point of view, are not to be described. In despotic govern ments, from the want of similar in stitutions, the smothered embers accumulate heat in secret, until they burst into a general flame. The people, impatient at length of enduring the wrongs over which they have long brooded in silent indignation, seek redress by open rebellion, as the only method by which they can hope to obtain it. In the ancient democratic states, in which the principle of representation was not adopted, endeavours to redress glaring defects in the constitution were usually productive of ferments, tumults, and factious disorders, which rendered the attempt abortive, or terminated in hasty and impolitic resolves. But in Great Britain, the house of commons serves as a conductor to draw off the lightning by a noiseless and constant discharge, instead of suffering it to collect until the cloud becomes incapable of containing it, and by an instantaneous flash to level to the ground a fabric, which ages had been employed in erecting."

The three following chapters we shall pass over in silence, remarking only, that the eighth, which relates to the duties of naval and military officers, contains in the notes several important and striking facts derived from the best authority, and contributing very much to diversify and to enforce the reasoning. The same observation applies also to the thir[*M]

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teenth chapter, and indeed, in writ ings of the didactic kind, examples can hardly be too often employed. The recital occurring in the tenth chapter, of the temptations which assail a justice of the peace is forcibly expressed:

"Every situation and employment in life influences, by a variety of moral causes, the views, tempers, and dispositions, of those who are placed in it. The justice of the peace can plead no exemption from this general rule. The nature of his authority, and the mode in which it is exercised, have an obvious tendency to produce some very undesirable alterations in his character, by implanting new failings in it, or by aggravating others to which he may have antecedently been prone. His jurisdiction is extremely extensive, and comprises a multiplicity of persons and cases. The individuals who are brought before him are almost universally bis inferiors, and commonly in the lowest ranks of society. The principal share of his business is transacted in his own house, before few spectators, and those in general indigent and illiterate. Hence he is liable to become dictatorial, brow beating, consequential, and ill-humoured; domineering in his inclinations, dogmatical in his opinions, and arbitrary in his decisions. He knows, indeed, that most of his decisions may be subject to revisal at the ses sions, but he may easily learn to flatter himself, that he shall meet with no severe censure from his friends and brethren on the bench, for what they will probably consider as an oversight, or, at the most, as an error easily remedied, and therefore of little importance. He knows too, that he may be called to account

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before the court of king's bench; but he is also aware that great tenderness is properly shewn by courts of law to the conduct of a justice, unless a culpable intention on his part is clearly proved, and that the objects he may be tempted to aggrieve are usually too humble, ignorant, and timid, to think of seeking redress, except in very palpable and flagrant cases, and frequently too poor to be able to undertake the task of seeking it in any. In consequence, moreover, of being perpetually conversant in his official ca. pacity with the most worthless members of the community, destined as it were to register every crime perpetrated within many miles of his habitation, and witnessing petty acts of violence, knavery, and fraud, committed by men who had previously maintained a tolerable good character in their neighbourhood, he may readily acquire the habit of P beholding all mankind with a suspicious eye; of cherishing sentiments of general distrust, and of looking with less and less concern on the distresses of the common people, from 19 a vague and inconsiderate persuasion that they seldom suffer more than they deserve. Against these snares and temptations which beset him on C every side, and will infallibly circumvent him in a greater or less de gree, if he rests in heedless inattention, or in false ideas of security, let him guard with unremitting vigil lance. If they are suffered to undermine those better resolutions, and supplant those better purposes with which he entered upon his office; let him not think that he shall escape from the circle of their influence, when he quits the limits of his justice-room. They will follow him into every scene of private and do

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a single individual may contribute in no small degree to produce a moral revolution in the commercial character."

The rules which our author gives for the regulation of paper credit are very judicious:

"The fundamental principle to be insisted on, with respect to contracting engagements of the nature in question, is that which should regulate every engagement of every kind namely, that they who promise should know themselves to be able to perform. It is manifestly not enough that he who signs or indorses a bill (for the same general principles attach to both) should know that he is able ultimately to pay it; he should know that he is able to pay it, that is to say, to find means of paying it at the time when it becomes due. In this latter particular, however, some latitude of interpretation is allowable. He is not bound to be morally certain that he shall be able to pay it in every possible emergence which may arise. The possibility of a great political convulsion, of a general stagnation in mercantile credit, or of some very extraordinary loss of his own; though any one of these events might disable an individual from paying his bill, should not prevent him from giving a bill, these not being events reasonably to be calculated upon. And the concurring demands of a very large number of holders of his notes are no more to be calculated upon than the cases above-mention ed: indeed, they commonly imply the existence of one of those cases, namely, a general stagnation of mercantile credit. Neither a banker, therefore, nor any other person, is bound in conscience to limit his signature and indorsement of bills to

the sum which he knows he may by possibility be required to pay; nor to that which he may have literally bound himself to pay; but to the sum for which he may reasonably expect that he shall, in consequence of those engagements, be called upon Care, however, is to be taken, and in the case of a banker especial care, that he keeps on the prudent side."

Our author's caution to merchants against the practice of covering ships, as the term is, in time of war, or making them over by & fictitious transfer to the subject of some neutral power, that by means of the papers procured through the pretended sale they may appear to be neutral property if taken by the enemy, is well worthy their attention.

"It may be urged, perhaps, in behalf of this proceeding, that it is confessedly allowable to impose on an adversary; that the art of war consists of stratagems and feints; that no moralist was ever rigid enough to condemn the admiral or the merchantman for hanging out false colours; and that it is absurd to maintain that it is lawful to deceive an antagonist by fictitious flags, yet unlawful to delude himby fictitious papers. This is not the place for examining how far and on what grounds it may be justifiable for open enemies to impose on each other; nor is the proceeding under consideration to be tried or justified by those rules; for here is a third part introduced, the inhabitant of the neutral state, a state in profound peace with both the contending nations; who deliberately suffers himself to be bribed by a subject of the one to practice an artifice on those of the other, which no plea, but that of being himself engaged