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THE CONSERVATIVE MINISTRY AND THEIR OPPONENTS.
The ascendancy of the manufacturing classes in this country is becoming daily more and more threatening to the common welfare. Already they are intolerant of labour, except at their own prices; nor will they suffer those to be in power who are not of them or with them. Taken as a body, these classes are guided in their politics by cheap Radical Sunday papers, and minor local publications of a still more subversive character, as also by stirring demagogues, of various power and influence for evil, from the club-orator to the great impediment at St. Stephen's. Taken as a body, their tendencies are in religion to Dissent, or more frequently to Mammon worship; in morality, to self-interest, glossed and coloured over by a transparent affectation of partisanship; in politics, to the perpetual tumbling down of old and reverend institutions, in order to supplant them by new, untried, inexperienced, often vulgar or little refined, and most inadequate substitutes. Above all, they are intolerant of all and everything that is not of themselves.
Herein, we hold, lies the great error of an industrious, enterprising, hard-working, skilful race of men, and of those who guide them in their social opinions—who help to form their likes and dislikes. We are very far from disparaging the manufacturing classes. We regard them with the respect due to one of the most wondrous phenomena of the age. Although we doubt if they have conduced, only in a very indirect manner, to increase the happiness of any one individual in the country, we are ready to grant that they have brought about unexampled prosperity. They have, with the aid of the commercial classes, and the mariners of Old England—the sturdy, sinewy race of bold adventurers, whose interests, so deeply interwoven with that of the manufacturing classes, have been yet sacrificed at the same shrine—raised this country to the highest pinnacle of riches and power. But this does not, by any means, constitute a right to be the sole rulers of this great nation. That they should have voices, loud in proportion to their importance, and as numerous and influential as their own host, none will deny; but that they should prevent any other party from holding power, except those who are prepared to go along with them and do their behests, is a state of things which, if not firmly and energetically combated in time, will soon leave all other interests prostrate, and at the mercy of one particular class.
And are there not other interests in Great Britain besides the manufacturing? Without wishing to put one class against another, when, on the contrary, they are meant by nature to co-operate, are there not the agricultural classes? Are there not the colonial interests, which have been so grossly abused in the West Indies, in Kaffraria, and in almost every corner of the world, by the late incompetent ministry? Are there not the large class of rulers and their servants, customs, taxes, and all the other working departments of a national administration? Are there not the gallant defenders of the country—a body especially calumniated by the too often stunted and blighted artisan? Are there not, finally, all that concerns the education, the morality, the social well-being, the cultivation of taste, the intellectual progress, indeed, all the better and higher portions of our nature,—religion, science, art, literature, philosophy, and law? Is wealth the sole source of national prosperity? Is there no such thing as religious
