The civil grievances of the revolutionists arose out of certain measures of the King, in some of which he was manifestly wrong; his attempts to render Dutch the national language for all public documents in certain provinces--to abolish trial by jury, which had been established by the French--to remove the supreme court of judicature to the Hague--and to introduce the principles of Dutch law into all their pleas and proceedings. The two latter were the usual vexatious manifestations of the spirit of centralization, which a prudent government would never have attempted to force upon the unwilling prejudices of a nation; and the substitution of the Dutch tribunal for the trial by jury would have been a substantial injustice, had the people been unanimous, or even, in a considerable proportion, favourable to it; but in the divisions upon the question in the States General, large bodies of the Belgian representatives were found voting constantly against it; and _even now, notwithstanding its re-establishment, it has become more and more unpopular, and even those who supported it in 1830, refuse to sit upon juries themselves, or to uphold the system by their co-operation_. The alteration of the language was an unwise attempt to force upon four millions of Belgians the dialect of three millions of Dutch. This has, however, been sought to be defended by stating, that of the entire population of the united kingdom, one fifth alone spoke French, namely in Hainault, the Waloons, South Brabant, and a part of Luxembourg; and the remainder dialects of German, in the proportion of two fifths Dutch, and two fifths Flemish. The imposing Dutch upon the entire was not, therefore, more unjust than would have been a similar imposition of Flemish, _and yet, within this very year, the party who reviled the one to the death in 1830, have begun to petition the legislature for the other_! They are contented now to abandon French, which they then contended for, and to accept the barbarous patois of Flanders as its substitute, which would be equally unintelligible to the Waloons, and even in those districts of Antwerp which border upon Holland.