read his books, and has common sense to understand them. We put this question seriously to Mr. Weed; because as the professed advocate of the Anti-Masonic cause, he must be aware, that any erroneous opinions, or misrepresentations of his, may produce wide-spread and ruinous effects to that cause, upon the success of which hang all our hopes of preserving the constitutional liberties of this land; and we beg him to reconsider the subject, for he may rest assured he will find no such law has even the shadow of an existence.

We can tell him, however, where he can find the authorities, or precedents, as they are called, upon which we presume this fatuitous or felonious decision was made. He will find them in the arbitrary, tyranical, and weak or wicked decisions of partial and corrupt, or infatuated and bigotted Judges of Great Britain and America. But he will find no law for it, not the shadow of law for it, in this country. Several of our Supreme Court Judges, it is true, have made such decisions; but they have made them in the face of law, in the face of right, in the face of liberty and justice; and every Judge who has been guilty of making such a decision, ought to have been impeached and removed from the bench for it; and so ought the Judges who turned Giddins out of court, were it not that they are honest farmers, (save one) misled by mistaking the unauthorised, extra-Judicial, arbitrary and illegal decisions of their Supreme Superiors for the law of the land; a mistake not to be wondered at in them, since a legislator, like Mr. Weed, has run into it.

NOTE BY R. CARLILE.

The case, in which the evidence of Edward Giddins was rejected, was a trial for conspiracy in the abduction of a man who is supposed to have been murdered as a revealing freemason, by other masons.

In the year 1826, after I had published an Exposure of Freemasonry in 1825, the same thing was attempted in North America, and one William Morgan, who had been a captain in some kind of North American employ, was the first to announce his intention to do it. Under the pretence of a writ for debt, this man was arrested and handed about from one gang of masons to another, in secresy, until he was no more heard of; and there is not a doubt but he has been masonically murdered. The United States of North America have been deeply agitated on the subject of this believed murder; rewards have been offered for discoveries; trials for conspiracy to abduct and for abduction have taken place, until such a storm is raised, that the Anti-Masonic Test has become the great point of eligibility to all offices. Newspapers and magazines have been started purposely as AntiMasonic Beacons and Observers, to write down Masonry; aud every paper announces renunciations and denunciations of masonry; so far indeed that Masonry can no longer survive in the Northern States.

It was on one of those trials for conspiracy, out of which some evidence of the murder of William Morgan, by the Masons, would have been educed, that the evidence of this very intelligent man, Edward Giddins, was rejected. His letter is a well written letter, and evinces the love of truth that can alone make evidence respectable. This is a very good postscript to the Letter and Lesson to the Duke of Wellington.

LETTER 47.-FROM THE REV. ROBERT TAYLÓR,

NEW YEAR'S PROSPECTS.

DEAR MR. CARLILE,-There is a very clever adage that represents it as a ninth beatitude, by some error dropt out of the text of Christ's mountebank sermon-" Blessed are they that entertain no expectations, for they shall never be disappointed." As predicated of expectations, that the humble in station, or unfortunate in circumstances, might be betrayed to repose in the virtue, honour, or honourable feeling of aristocratical tyrants, the adage is replete with moral wisdom. And I am now right heartily glad, that it ruled my mind's observance in my late application to the Right Hon. Robert Peel. It requires no great advance in the moral science, to be able to make a very accurate calculation, as to the probable when, where, how, and under what modifications and circumstances, such a man as Mr. Peel, would do an act that itself would be morally right. Imprimis, when he could by no possibility stumble on any other sort of action.-2nd. When it should not cost him the pains of a thought, of an inquiry, or of the diversion of his shallow-hearted vanity, from that eternal round of dissipation and luxury which constitutes the whole business of life, to the officers and ministers of a profligate and unprincipled government.-3rd. When something should be to be got by it, to his own popularity and influence, such as the chance of being toasted at a more-than-half drunken city feast, as the friend of civil and religious liberty.-4th. And when nothing should be to be lost by it, and no hazard at all incurred, of abating the adulations of the pimps and parasites of the church, and the lordships and ladyships of the drawing room, or of doing anght that "might seem disgracious in the city's eyes." In a word, when in some way or other it shall gratify his own selfishness, then, and not till then, however late, the Right Hon. Robert Peel will be just:—and send you in his bill for it.

For, after all, your great statesmen are very little creatures, and like the rascal GOD, save us, or damn us, not for our merits or demerits, but only with a view to their own glory. I am vastly inclined to be a little popish in this matter, as I find a prayer addressed to the Almighty, at the end of the mass-book, which most wonderfully expresses my state of sentiment and feeling towards the Almighty Robert Peel-O Lord God, if thine own goodness will not induce thee to be merciful unto me !— my importunity shall make thee."

There is a little waggery in this humble suit of a sinner, which might make you suspect the genuineness of the quotation, but I assure you that it is genuine, and worth observance; as supplying a consolatory evidence, that in that depth of mental imbecility, than which there is no lower deep, there is an indefeasiNo. 1.-Vol. 3.

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ble recalcitrative energy, that tends to throw the mind up again from its degradation, and pump it into a necessity of being reasonable. The Methodists have invented a technical phrase for this, 'tis "wrestling with God," an admission (if the idiots dared to trust themselves with the consciousness of a meaning to their own words), that their God is but an unreasonable sort of a being, and that we should all be the gainers if he could but once be fairly floored. With this view, and in this sentiment, I purposely gave my humble petition to the Right Hon. Robert Peel, the tone that became a petitioner upon my argument, the wrestling character: as hoping this God on earth, might not persist in his inexorability against the force of a struggle, in which the other fellow would be conquered.

I had indeed well perpended the manner of application as well as the matter; the way of doing, as well as the propriety of its being done; I took the exact dimensions of all the difference that could possibly result between any one style and any other, that is, between the most humble and conciliatory, and the most firm and dignified; I have paid Mr. Peel a greater compliment, (though I owe him none), than calculating on him as likely to surrender to the meanness of cringing sycophancy, what he would withhold from right, or what he would be justified in withholding because that right had not been begged as a favour. In truth, it is not a favour that I seek from Mr. Peel, but it is a right. In granting it, he will but act as a wise and good man ought to act; in withholding it, he is neither wise nor good; and while I sincerely believe and anticipate that he will withhold it, and have far more reason to think and fear that he will, than hope or prospect of his relenting; but I have as little appetite for piping low and humble to his godhead, as for biting the walls which surround me: every brick and stone of which doth say to me " Such, such, even such, are Christians." And would upbraid my folly if I expected more yielding from them, than these. Besides, I had previously analyzed the moral compages of Peel, and found him flint to the inmost core. I had been guilty of two previous humble applications from this house of bondage, that wanted no grace that modest meekness and humility could give them, and I have found it much easier to forgive Mr. Peel for his cruelty in treating them with sovereign contempt, than to forgive myself for having put it into his power to treat me so,-which I will never do again.

The proud man's contumely,

The insolence of office, and the spurns,

That patient merit from the unworthy takes,

would never acquire that heart-breaking, and spirit-dejecting power which drives so many to the soliloquy of "To be, or not to be," had they not by the vice and habit of an enervating and priest-directed education, been led to the mistake of supposing

that humility was a virtue; that is, that the properties of a snail or of a cur, became a man. An ungentle, or a boisterous carriage indeed, or any mode of conduct that trespassed on the dignity of others, or that withheld from others the deference that we should feel ourselves entitled to, if we stood in their places, would itself be tyrannous, and betray that very disposition in the slave who so conducted himself, which all brave and good men despise and resist in the tyrant.

But never can there be fitness, or reason, in bowing and cringing to a mere barber's block with a wig on it, or for honouring a mere Robert Peel, for filling an office, when we find him, filling it only in such a way, as that there shall not be a Jack in the kingdom, but who would fill it as well as he?

It is this sycophancy that defeats the power of praise, and ultimately defeats itself and its own ends; when the vote of thanks becomes a mere matter of form, and he who holds an office, knows before hand, that he cannot hold it so vilely, nor misuse it so abominably, but that he shall be sure of all the eulogies, compliments, thanks, and acknowledgements that are to come in of course, like derry down, at the end of a song; and that Nero shall be no less the Saviour of the people, than Antoninus. And what has a Secretary of State for the Home department, to do, merely as a Secretary of State, to ensure his invitations to Cityfeasts, to have his health proposed from the chair, to have his maudlin acknowledgements of the honour done him, cheered with three times three, and greasy place-hunters "mark him, and write his speeches in their books?"-what, but to be exceeding pompous, arrogant, and proud, to have his ears filled with the kind of stuff that lord and lady wit can pour into them, but deaf to poor men's prayers; to be absorbed in engagements of Heliogabalus's feasts, to keep the chronology of routs, balls, and concerts; but to be inexorably inaccessible, dumb and dead to all remonstrances of persecuted virtue, to all complaints of suffering innocence, to all that the intention of his office was to oblige him to do,-but, pocketing the profits of it.

Should it come to pass, that a succession of applications to Parliament in my behalf, should become troublesome to him, that the public notoriety of my wrongs should be too prominent to be set aside by neglect, or to be answered by repetitions of his already avowed contempt; or should I happily succeed in engaging the advocacy of some, whom he may not find it politic to treat with neglect, or to answer with contempt: then, will this little man in the great office, endeavour at my expence, to invest himself with the credit of liberality, and grant what he can no longer withhold, laying all the blame on me, as not having applied in the proper way, that it had not been granted before.

Under these views, and prognostications, my purpose was so to address the man from whom I expected so little favour, as to

THE LION.

provide for the solace of my own feelings, in the anticipated issue of his treating that appeal as he has others. If I had had better hope, I should have used an humbler tone. But, in my heart I don't like the man. I have a very ugly opinion of him, and I'd rather live on short commons all my days, than chew so much wormwood, and swallow down the spittle, as I must, e'en to choaking, to have been more than civil to him. A fellow-I say not who he was, spoke of me as an object of contempt— turn thy complexion that way," and I think that my letter to the Right Hon. Robert Peel, who knows the thief that so spoke of me, was miraculously civil: and if it wasn't, I dont care, for I am sure it was, as civil as possible.

"

Severe experience has enforced on me the moral lesson, that in any case of adversity or wrong whatever, a man should never let his sufferings betray him into meanness, nor sink into such an attitude of supplication, as he cannot rise from again with dignity. The well-standing in our own esteem, is (I am sure, for I have felt it,) to be provided for before all considerations-to be ensured at all hazards-to be held through all sacrifices.

Without this jewel, fortune! we are poor,

And with it rich! take what thou wilt away.

I never knew, nor heard of any man whom it was in the power of fate or fortune to drive on desperate counsels, who had not first parted with that "immediate jewel of his soul ;" and better it is, I am sure, a thousand times, that a good man should make up his mind to suffer the worst that can befal him, with silent dignity, than that he should aggravate misfortune, by meanness, or run the hazard of accumulating contempt upon calamity.

Our great and glorious cause itself, to which I cheerfully surrender my life, (and I mean the surrender, when I pledge it,) never yet gained an inch by any sort of compromising, conciliating, or truckling measures. Our enemies are not to be cajoled, outwitted, or manoeuvred into defeat. This, Robert Owen, and his sticklers have found; this, the Universalists, Bible Christians, and Demi-semi-anything-arians of all sorts have proved; this, the God-and-mammon-London-University will find; and the fruitless issues of all the go-between works that have characterized and disgraced our periodical literature, have demonstrated. these juggling and managing men, that are for doing things so very judiciously, and for mixing the spirit of priestcraft, with the advocacy of truth and reason, in reality do more harm than good; and, by their example and conduct, serve to keep greater knaves than themselves (if there be any) in countenance; inducing, in any converts they may make, a diathesis and character of mind, not a whit better than the superstition from which they had been reclaimed.

Who, blind to thought's fatiguing ray,

As fortune gives example, choose their way;

All