Page 54 - Hampdens Monument Unveiled

characterize it. A more clear and complete exposition of
principles could not be desired, and the closing portion,
describing the closing hours of the patriot was full of solemn
and subduing tenderness beyond the reach of the art of the mere
professional orator.

The speech of Sir John Easthope, though containing some just
sentiments, was most unsatisfactory. The baronet of the Morning
Chronicle saw things through a rose coloured medium. Fully
admitting' the justice of the distinctions drawn between the
times of HAMPDEN and the present time, we emphatically deny
first, that the same elements of mischief to the public are not
at work, and secondly, we most emphatically deny that the
press, as a whole, or even in its most sound members,
effectually supplies the place of such as HAMPDEN in the moral
struggle. The daily press, as a whole is sordid; it speaks for
the monied class, for the faction in power or seeking power; it
either justifies wrong doing, or feebly defends the right, and
is always behind, and not in advance of public opinion on any
great occasion.

Take a recent example as an illustration of the character of
Sir John Easthope's Hampdens of the press! A minister of the
crown brings in a bill, which, looking at the period in which
we live, embodied principles more offensive, and as much
opposed to Free Monarchy and representative institutions as any
measure proposed by the members of the would -be Autocrat
Charles Stuart; a bill which sought to confer a taxing power,
upon irresponsible trustees; a bill which made hateful
distinctions-unjust distinctions between those who, though
receiving the sacred scriptures, do not receive the whole of
the Prayer Book, a bill which interfered between parents and
children, which sought to take part of the wages of labour -a
bill which legalised compulsion, and forced monstrous penalties
-such a bill was brought into Parliament, with words indeed
softer than butter, but constructed upon principles
diametrically opposed to all that distinguishes a free monarchy
from a despotism : we know what HAMPDEN and PYM, and men of
that heroic age, would have done: they would have said to the
traitor -mister what Pym said to the recreant traitor Stratford
------ "I will never leave you while your head is upon your
shoulders. "

But what said our modern Hampdens in Parliament and by the
press? They took the soft words of the minister for gospel
truth, and, at his bidding, were prepared to cast an iron
network over the mind of England; and that, too, under the
hypocritical pretence, that it was a remedy for evils, the
fruit of centuries of misgovernment! We must be plain on this
occasion, to tell Sir John Easthope and the people, that
neither press nor Parliament is to be trusted. If any other